


Icarus (protect the flames)

by ginoeh



Category: Naruto
Genre: ANBU - Freeform, Alternate Universe, Anbu Hatake Kakashi, BAMF Haruno Sakura, Blood and Violence, Everyone Has Issues, Haruno Sakura-centric, Hatake Kakashi Has Issues, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, Smart Haruno Sakura, Strong Haruno Sakura, Strong Uzumaki Naruto, Trauma, Unreliable Narrator, no alien space godesses, prodigy!Sakura, starts out light but...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 10:40:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24968347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ginoeh/pseuds/ginoeh
Summary: When Sakura realizes that playing little girl and flunking combat training had probably been a gross miscalculation on her part, she’s stranded in a rickety home in a run down country with an unconscious sensei. Sakura isn’t sure if she can make up for that mistake before it kills her or her team but she sure as hell will give it her best shot.She really couldn’t have known that falling victim to Hatake Kakashi’s unique attempts at teaching would open up another can of worms entirely.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura & Hatake Kakashi, Haruno Sakura & Hatake Kakashi's Ninken, Haruno Sakura & Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto, Haruno Sakura & Uzumaki Naruto, Uchiha Sasuke & Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 420
Kudos: 1805
Collections: Fics I loved, Mixed_Fics, Strong BAMF Sakura





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Most kids want their parents to be happy with them. Sakura was no exception to that rule. And while she had been kind of proud when she had cheated her way out of the early graduation her parents had feared, she had obviously severely underestimated how much she had derailed her Shinobi education in the process.
> 
> Hatake Kakashi suddenly finds himself holding the undivided attention of a desperate student and he really doesn’t know what to do. So he – improvises. 
> 
> It seems to work. 
> 
> Really!
> 
> ***************
> 
> So... it's been a long time since I wrote anything. A... really, really long time. Looking at the creation date of my last attempt at fanfiction makes me feel positively ancient.
> 
> In any case. This happened. And now I feel like I have to post it?
> 
> And, erm, don't worry about this mission arc. It won't be long. I know that it's been done to death...

* * *

**Shallow** waves gurgled against the pier. The bubbling sound of the water mixed with Naruto’s snores in the next room. The creaky wooden building did nothing to damp the sounds of its inhabitants.

Sakura stared across the room onto the still form of her teacher, silvery moonlight casting his equally light hair in a ghostly hue and throwing a sharp relief against the darkened corners of their small abode.

The house was quiet; even Tsunami-san had gone to bed a while prior. Her steps had been light and fast in contrast to the old bridgebuilder’s shuffling gait. Sakura assumed from the clanking of earthenware that he had been drinking again until his daughter corralled him into bed. 

Kakashi-sensei didn’t twitch. Only his slow and steady breathing assured her that he had indeed survived. Or maybe he was just an apparition and the moonbeams that seemed to love him so much would spirit him away on their rays in a stream of sparkling dust when they left come morning.

Annoyed, Sakura shook her head and rubbed her burning eyes. How stupidly whimsical of her. She was really tired, though. Sleep sounded like the perfect solution to a pretty bad day, if only she hadn’t already tried and failed at it.

It was hard though, to be forced to reevaluate the last five years of her life and to suspect that maybe, maybe she had made a mistake – had miscalculated – had sabotaged herself for too long. 

She had known what to do, when the Demon Brothers attacked. Mission protocol was clear, their formation was easy, she had detected Kakashi-sensei’s substitution, had understood what the intended effect was and had acted accordingly in protecting their mission objective, Tazuna.

But… would she have been able to even do anything if action had been required of her?

Yes, she had always made sure that her reflexes were up to scratch, her accuracy was topnotch and even her academy kata were way above average. She had had to try hard to not train too much, to not try too much - it would have been so easy to be better and faster and stronger and she had yearned to compete with her classmates and to surpass them. 

Only, she had wanted her parents to not worry over her even more. 

So, when that teacher had come and talked about graduation - not even two years after she had started at the academy – and her parents’ proud cheerfulness had turned into badly hidden frowns and strained smiles, she adapted.

She just had to treat it like a mission, she had told herself. Go undercover, pretend to be a little girl - fawn, giggle, gossip and watch how to blend in. Mostly, it came easily. She had missed the adrenaline of competition most, though.

Sakura shifted from her seiza, circulating her chakra a bit faster to chase out the tingling of numb limbs. And then Zabuza had happened. She'd been useless - no,worse than useless. For all her vaunted intellect, the one thing she had not shackled down with her silly-girl facade, she hadn't made the connection between Naruto's white rabbit and a substitution; for all the rules and regulations she had memorized she hadn't been able to commit to a course of action; for all the ease with which she calculated trajectories, learned taijutsu kata and manipulated chakra she hadn't been able to help her team at all.

She wasn't able to fight her way out of even a paperbag. Sakura was a liability in the field. 

The realization hurt.

Kakashi-sensei’s breathing was perfectly calm. If her gaze wasn’t fixed on him she’d never have noticed that a dark eye suddenly observed her.

“We’re at Tazuna’s house”, she whispered, “it’s approximately 0200 hours, you’ve been unconscious for nearly 10 hours, chakra exhaustion most likely. The boys are sleeping in the next room.”

She dithered for half a second if there was anything else he would want to know immediately.

“We don’t have any injuries”, she ended with, lamely.

“Thanks, Sakura.” Kakashi-sensei’s voice was a low rasp and his exposed eye flickered across the expanse of the sparse room. She had taken care to have him situated with his obvious blind spot to the wall.

“I have water”, she offered quietly but didn’t make a move to approach him yet. While her parents never made it beyond Genin, uncle Koji had, and it had been made clear to her to never crowd unconscious or disorientated ninja that had a few years of field experience. Jounin definitely fell into that category. 

He nodded once and tracked her approach lazily. 

She didn’t offer her help when he painstakingly levered himself up. It didn’t seem like he’d appreciate the physical contact; it was clear that he was still dizzy, though.

He slowly sipped the offered water, his back resting against the wall.

“You are not rooming with the boys”, he said, more statement than question.

“Inappropriate”, Sakura knew she had sounded particularly flat so she went on, “A unconscious comrade shouldn’t be left unsupervised, if possible.” She shrugged self-deprecatingly. “And my sensing isn’t all that great, so…”

“Much appreciated.”

Sakura tried not to react to the barely-there sarcasm in the Jonin’s voice. It wasn’t like she would have been any help in case of an emergency; she knew that. 

“It’s protocol.” 

A grey eye flickered over her form again, likely noticing everything from the polite distance she kept, to her hair in a high bun, to the way her face probably twitched when she had restrained the silly cute-girl-smile-and-head-cant she had made part of herself. 

“Aa, it is.” 

He set down the empty glass. “Get me a ration bar. Please.”

Mutely, she handed him one out of her own pack, not wanting to riffle through his without explicit permission. 

And still, he kept observing her. He wasn’t even covert about it. 

For the second time, she had to repress the learned response to smile and project mellow defenselessness, as was her rote response whenever one of the academy teachers looked too closely. Sakura wondered what Kakashi-sensei saw.

She couldn’t get a read on his thoughts at all. His body language betrayed nothing.

Eventually, the ration bar was gone and with a small sigh, Kakashi-sensei slid down the wall and back onto his bedroll. 

“I’ll likely be asleep until mid-morning, at least”, he warned her, “but you can wake me if something important comes up.”

He turned a bit to give her an eyesmile that had her let go of some of the tension that sat tight in her shoulders.

“You did well, Sakura. Go to sleep.” 

A yawn crept up on her even as he said it.

***

So that Hunter-nin had been a fake and Zabuza was probably still alive and convalescing at some hideout. 

Retrospectively, Sakura had to admit that the discrepancies were glaring. She had noticed that the disappearing act the Oinin had pulled was against typical Konoha standards for Hunters but then again… Kiri wasn’t Konoha, and she wasn’t exactly an authority on Hunter-nin anywhere. 

She swung her legs a little, up in her tree, seeing the faces of her teammates looking at her in a mixture of dismay and determination.

“Well”, her sensei goaded,” it looks like Sakura-kun here is closer to either of your goals than both of you combined.” 

Sakura twitched at the obvious provocation. That wouldn’t exactly promote teamwork. On the other hand, Naruto and Sasuke both were really single-minded and unobservant. It should get them to work, at least.

And maybe make Sasuke realize that there were areas where he was not the top dog, at least where chakra control was concerned. It had been a blow to realize that she felt real, cutting hurt, when Sasuke had brushed her off this morning. She had even actively tried to not hide behind Sakura-the-fangirl.

She didn’t think he had noticed that, however. 

And now here she was, with a tiny but hard ball of anger and shame sitting in her stomach at the realization that her farce had become partly real. 

Sakura looked down the tree, considering. It had been easy, nearly instinctual, to find the correct amount of chakra to stick to it. On the other hand, she already felt exhaustion setting in, not only in her core muscles from the unusual strain of holding her body horizontal but also the more pervasive one that signified emptying chakra stores. 

She didn’t bother to catch the downward turn of her lips at that. Her chakra stores must be tiny if that one tree was already exhausting them!

A glance at Kakashi-sensei proved that he wasn’t particularly invested in watching her, now that she had completed the assigned task. Then again, he didn’t even watch Naruto and Sasuke who were stubbornly running at their own trees and clearly not getting the concept of chakra regulation.

If they kept up their brute force approach they’d be out of trees before the day was over.

They definitely didn’t have her problem. And what did one even do to increase their chakra stores? Did they build like muscles? If yes, then should she just go up and down the tree until she was chakra exhausted again and again?

Sakura really wished the Academy had focused a bit more on chakra theory. In any case, walking her tree up and down should at least get her used to the sensation and build up her core muscles.

Casting a last look at her disinterested teacher – she could ask him about building up chakra stores but then she’d run the risk of him having her do something else entirely – she set to the task of walking down the tree. 

And up.

And down.

And up…

When lunchtime arrived, cold sweat was beading on Sakura’s neck and she was sure her face was a particularly ugly mixture of blotched red and white. She settled down on the base of her tree and got out one of her protein bars with shaking fingers. Flushing chakra through her muscles to faster break down lactic acid and keep them loose, she frowned at herself. She couldn’t keep this up for the rest of the day. She was pretty sure that at a point not too far off she would simply fall off her tree and probably break her neck in the process or something equally embarrassing. 

Kakashi-sensei was still leaned against his tree. How the man could sleep with the racket her two teammates made, Sakura had no idea. She was just glad that the two of them had moved several trees away after a tussle about something or other. She’d have hated to be sprayed by exploding bark for the whole morning. 

She fingered a pebble for a second and then threw it at Kakashi-sensei’s feet lazily.   
“Ne, sensei, I think I’m finished for now.” 

“Hmmm”, he stood slowly, leaning heavily on his crutch. Still dizzy then, Sakura observed. “I’ll go back with you. Could do with a nap.”

Sakura just rolled her eyes at him. “Sure sensei…” She rather thought that he should probably eat something before going back to sleep. Had he even eaten more than that one measly serving of rice and soup for breakfast that Tsunami-san had set before him? 

When they reached the dock in front of Tazuna’s house, she fished another protein bar out of her small daypack. He caught her throw with something like amusement on the visible part of his face and ripped off the wrapping. 

“You should try your hand at chakra meditation. Very relaxing, I hear. Good for increasing chakra reproduction rates as well”, he remarked off-handedly, as he ambled inside, throwing a half-hearted salute at Tsunami as he passed her. 

Chakra meditation, huh. Sakura hadn’t thought about that since she had managed to unlock her conscious chakra access when she was seven. Interesting.

*

When she returned to her and Kakashi-sensei’s room later in the afternoon, chakra coils tingling and muscles aching, there were several high energy protein bars laying on her bedroll.

***

“Where’s the idiot?”, was Sasuke’s first non-grunting communication attempt of the day when he came down the stairs after a desperately needed shower.

Sakura, who had just come in herself from another afternoon at the bridge with Tazuna, alternately meditating and hopping across construction beams bringing tools from and to the workers, shrugged in response.

“Didn’t he come in with you?”

The black-haired boy shook his head and carefully took a place at the small table next to Sakura, side-eyeing her as if she would use the opportunity to suddenly glomp him to death. He shot a glare at their teacher who was sprawled across the seats on the other side of the table.

Sakura bit back a small grin. He looked a bit like a skittish cat with his wet hair and scowl.

And damn her infatuation. A scowl was not supposed to be cute.

“Hn”, was the extent of his answer but his instant grab for the rice and gyudon topping was nonverbal communication at its finest. ‘Tough for him, more food for me’, he clearly said.

The meal was silent, only Tsunami puttering around in the kitchen and the clinking tableware distracted from the sounds of busy eating.

When the sun had well and truly set Sakura looked up from the history book she was reading and watched Sasuke sharpen his kunai with a rhythmic tchink-sound. 

“Where were you training?”, she asked.

“Hn?” He stopped, confused.

Sakura rolled her eyes and set down the book. 

“You and Naruto. Where were you training?”

“Further down the bay”, he said, disinterested gaze going back to his kunai, “About a five-minute-run inwards, closer to the road leading back out from the village.”

So, Naruto was still within the area Kakashi-sensei had circumfenced with a seal line on their second day here. He’d know if anyone crossed over it. At least, there was that. 

Sasuke went to bed soon after and only the soft turning of Kakashi-sensei’s book kept her company. If Sasuke was this tired, then Naruto probably was as well. Where was that stupid boy? Did he fall asleep on his way back?

She really shouldn’t be concerned but… Her eyes fell on the leftover dinner. He’d surely be hungry by now. Carefully, she set aside a generous portion for him. Eating did help with recovering chakra, after all.

***

Yes, Naruto did spend the night in the forest. Sakura felt exhausted just thinking about it. No dinner, crawling ants, dewy wet grass, obligatory mist… She shuddered. 

“Sasuke-kun, wait a moment, please”, she said as she noticed the boy was trying to slink out the door unobtrusively. 

“Hn.” His reply wasn’t exactly enthusiastic and she could have done without the suspicious look he threw over his shoulder (or the heat in her cheeks at the handsome picture he made, backlit against the bright morning sun, hair swept rakishly across his face) but he did stop his exit. 

“I – uummm…” 

How she hated that stupid crush. Hopefully he didn’t see the blush that was burning it’s way up her collar. 

“What is it?” He looked wary. And dismissive. Oh, how rude! At least the burgeoning anger – at herself and at his missing manners – made it easier to rally herself again.

“I saved leftovers from dinner”, she said, trying for cool and collected but probably sounding breathless instead.

“I don’t-“ he began derisively, likely tired of girls pushing unwanted bento boxes on him.

“For Naruto”, she interrupted. Well, now she did sound cool. And just a bit angry, probably.

Sakura felt a tiny smidge of satisfaction prickling in her chest when Sasuke looked surprised for the shortest of moments. 

“He hasn’t eaten since yesterday’s lunch. That can’t be healthy, with the way the two of you are training.” She handed the boy a huge packet filled with rice, toppings, protein snacks and grilled vegetables. Perplexed, Sasuke took the offering.

“Okay”, he said slowly, frowning.

“Have fun.” Sakura waved as he turned around, shoulders just slightly stiff and went his way. 

And if there happened to be extra tomatoes and a second set of chopsticks in the packet, well, she certainly wouldn’t point it out. She grinned and set out for a half-hour run across the bay’s tame waters. Kakashi-sensei had mentioned that water walking was more chakra-intensive than tree walking just yesterday morning, after all. 

It had sounded like a challenge.

***

The boys stumbled back up the pier just as Sakura finished wringing salty water out of her hair. They were leaning against each other, though Sasuke seemed terribly intent on making it look like he was the one supporting Naruto instead of it being a mutual thing.

The waning afternoon sun was pale and cool against the rising mist and Sakura sneezed with chattering teeth. She probably should have stopped training sooner. 

“Finished already?”, she asked thickly through a tingling nose when they finally made it up to where she was shivering in her drenched, sticky clothes. Saltwater was really the worst. Her eyes burned.

“You better believe it!”, Naruto said brightly. His grin was tired but infectious, nonetheless. It instantly lifted her mood, soured as it was by her continued shortcomings in the chakra capacity department. “And thanks for lunch, Sakura-chan! It really helped!”

“Hn”, was Sasuke’s commentary.

“Don’t be a bastard, bastard! Say thank you!” Naruto shoved lightly at Sasuke’s shoulder and the boy barely kept from falling flat on his face. “You stole half the rice! And all the tomatoes! And-“

“If you say I stole the vegetables, I’ll trip you into the water. You didn’t want to eat them in the first place!“ 

Despite the glare on his face the tips of his ears burned red. 

“I so wanted to eat them, bastard!”, Naruto predictably cried.

“Tch.”

A tussled erupted and shoving, tripping and limping the boys tumbled inside Tazuna’s rickety house, leaving Sakura by herself.

“You’re welcome”, she muttered drily towards their backs. Another shiver wracked her, and she hurriedly followed the boys inside.

By the time Kakashi-sensei came back with Tazuna, Naruto and Sasuke both had already turned in – though not before falling asleep over their early dinner twice and glaring at each other in between yawing – and Sakura was feeling decidedly ill.

Her nose was stuffed, her head pounded and there was a cough sitting deep in her chest. Grudgingly, she clutched a cup of hot tea between her cold fingers, curtesy of a fussing Tsunami. Despite showering, her eyes still itched from the saltwater they had been subjected to for most of the day. She sniffled, feeling miserably.

“There you go.” Tsunami set steaming pots of spicy stew in front of her father and Kakashi-sensei. Local staple dish, she had said and good against a cold. Something about spicy fermented cabbage? Sakura wasn’t sold on the healing powers of cabbage, but the soup tasted nice, at least.

“Itadakimasu”, both of them mumbled. Sakura was sure she didn’t blink but suddenly Kakashi-sensei’s pot was half empty. That… was fast. And couldn’t have been fun for him. The soup was really spicy. And really hot.

He did look a bit tense and pushed the rest of the soup away. 

Sakura took a sip of her tea. “Do you want something to drink, sensei?” She wasn’t sure if she had managed to keep the skepticism out of her voice but helpfully slid over a cup and the pitcher of water from her side of the table.

He stared at her for a long moment before he took the offered utensils. Sakura thought she heard him mutter something that sounded suspiciously like “not cute”. 

He did drain two glasses of water in fast succession, though.

“You should go to bed, Sakura”, he finally said, when Tsunami came bustling back in, scolding her father for wanting to drink again but still providing the asked for hot sake.

“There’s a medic pack in in the storage scroll in my backpack. Take a couple of pills from the sachet with general medication. You know which ones?”

“Yes, I’ll recognize them.” She also probably wouldn’t forget to pack them from now on.

He slid half a cup full of warm sake in her direction. “Bottoms up”, there was a smile in his uncovered eye. Sakura eyed him skeptically. Yes, she was theoretically allowed to drink alcohol but… 

“Alcohol doesn’t actually cure colds, Kakashi-sensei”, she said. He didn’t really believe in this civilian myth, did he?

“I’m aware”, came the unimpressed answer, “but it does enlarge capillaries, heightens body temperature and makes sleepy. All effects we want right now. In small doses, at least”, he amended. 

Giving in – because he did have a point with that – she tipped the cup back, shuddering slightly. It tasted just as bad as it had when Ino stole a bottle from her father for the last sleepover they’d had before their rivalry. She still didn’t know how her once-best-friend had done that without her parents noticing, however.

Tazuna watched on in what looked like mute horror. “But… but… she’s a kid! And you’re her teacher!”

Deciding to let her sensei handle that particular conversation – and yes, Tazuna was probably right, but Sakura was a shinobi and Kakashi-sensei had obviously learned his slipshod healing methods in an artillery ditch in backwater earth country or something, because, really? – she slipped up the stairs and into their room.

A brief ruffle through sensei’s pack provided the wanted medication and not five minutes later, Sakura’s head hit the pillow. 

Hopefully, she’d feel better come morning. 

***

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, I feel like I have to explain that Sakura has just a cold. I only need it for plot purposes and since this part was written last year already I didn't want to change it... So. Just a cold, nothing Itachi-esque, no pandemic... Peace \/


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura learns to apply textbook knowledge to real life. It's strangely effective.
> 
> Also, she makes a new friend...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just realized that this whole chapter is one giant scene... Sorry? 
> 
> And... I seem to be exceedingly bad at this tagging thing? I don't know... It's a work in progress. I'm learning, I swear!
> 
> (Also, EDITING! It's a thing, I hear... I'm despairing, honestly.)

* * *

***

  
 **When** her team finally noisily left the house with Tazuna in tow, Sakura crawled out of her bedroll. Kakashi-sensei had told her to sleep for a while longer but Naruto and Sasuke’s loud competition over breakfast had woken her up for good and her empty stomach urged her to leave the warmth of her bed. 

Quickly, she slipped into her outfit and put her weapons strap on and swallowed another couple of the all-purpose medication pills. The urge to cough wasn’t completely gone, but at least her headache had subsided during the night. 

Trailing down the stairs into the surprisingly sun flooded kitchen, she called a short good morning to Tsunami who was on her way to wake Inari. 

She helped herself to a generous portion of rice with pickles and miso soup.

Bypassing the sad remains of her team’s breakfast battlefield on the table, she left the house and took a seat at the pier, feet swinging, savoring the taste of homemade breakfast. 

With the sun warming her shoulders and the light’s reflection off the waves dancing in her eyes, it took her a while to notice that something felt off.

It was the sudden flock of fleeing sandpipers that tipped her off. Stilling the bowl of miso in front of her mouth she tipped her head just so and tried to get rid of the sunspots dancing across her eyelids.

Careless, to impair her vision like this, she scolded herself while she inconspicuously tried to watch the part where muddy brackish water met low shrubbery and finally the edges of the forest they had trained in all week.

There was a reflection where there should be none.

Slowly, Sakura stood and stretched, changing observation angles. Who was there? Fishermen? Then why were they loitering in the undergrowth? Ninja? Not likely. Sakura saw another glint reflecting brightly off polished metal. Ninja weapons were generally as non-reflecting as metal could get. 

She went back to the house, keeping her stride as casual as possible and the forest edge within her vision.

What should she do? Kakashi-sensei and her teammates had surely just about reached the bridge by now. 

Just as she turned to open the door, a welcome voice shouted from around the house’s corner.

“Hey hey, Sakura-chan, Sakura-chan!” Panting, Naruto slid low around the corner and doubled over behind one of the old barrels underneath the kitchen window, trying to catch his breath. It put him neatly out of the range of any thrown weapon or attack, Sakura noted incredulously. Did he already know-

“Sensei… sensei said there was a… a breach?” He gasped, red-faced. “Of a… perimeter? Or something. And you should… you should protect Tsunami and Inari and… head off the rest…?” It sounded more like a question than the relay of an order from her captain.

The rest? What rest? Who was he talking about?

Something splashed against the metal fitting of the door next to her head and Sakura instinctively hit the deck. An arrow skittered away on the wooden planks. Hurriedly, she robbed into the relative safety of the second barrel.

“Huh?” Naruto looked around himself wildly. “What-?”

“Get back down!” Sakura hissed at him, frantically grabbing at his sleeve when he made a move to stand up from his crouched position. “There are enemies-“

“What enemies!?” Naruto, true to form, squinted determinedly into the absolutely wrong direction. 

“You idiot! Get down!”

Another arrow splashed against the deck. Naruto shook her hand off his sleeve and stood.

“Don’t worry, Sakura-chan. I’m not – “

A glint of metal.

“Naruto!”

The arrow hit true. 

There was no air in Sakura’s lungs as she stared into Naruto’s blue, blue eyes, arrow sticking out of the side of his head and –

Poof.

“What?” Sakura croaked weakly, unsteady arms pushing against the wooden planks beneath her.

“It was…” Only a clone? Only a clone. Kakashi-sensei had Naruto send only a clone. That was - 

More arrows came her way, several hitting the walls and barrels and staying stuck. There was no time to feel… relieved? Horrified? Angry about being worth only a clone?

When the door suddenly opened a gap, Sakura shook herself out of her stupor.

“Stay inside,” she screamed at the pair of terrified eyes that peeked through the opening. “I’ll protect you! Barricade the door and stay away from the windows!”

Tsunami looked conflicted for a second, then another arrow impacted on the door and with an apologetic last glance the door was shut again.

Sakura, behind her old, half-decayed barrel doubling as kitchen garden, felt reality settle in. Now what? If she waited long enough, the archer would probably give up and come closer. If she waited too long… Clone-Naruto had mentioned an unspecified rest… were there more? 

She’d have to be fast then. 

A few diversions for getting close, maybe a standard explosion first, within the mud to make it seem messier, one under water, the third a flashbang… yes, that could work. She had run situation simulations at the academy that went a bit like this. 

Wrestling her sudden panic behind logical calculations, she wrapped her tags around kunai. She couldn’t afford to sacrifice more than three of the weapons, though, she only had two packets of them. Barely enough, if there were really more enemies coming. 

It should be exactly like target practice. And after that, the obstacle course. She took a deep breath.

Throw. An ear-shattering bang rattled her; mud splashed, fast as shrapnel. 

Run.

Cover. Her heart pounded against her ribs. 

Fudge the fuse by a few seconds, throw.

Run.

Cover. She dived down deep against the saltwater soaked earth, cocking her arm back for the next throw.

The watery mist from the second explosion had barely blown away, when the flashbang she had thrown, went off. She burrowed her head into the crook of her left arm, letting the worst die down before she exploded out of her flimsy cover of leafy shrubbery.

There was movement at the forest edge, slightly to her left. A shuriken left her hand without conscious thought, a second and third close behind. 

A pained scream made her adjust the trajectory of her dead sprint, the kunai in her hand ending what her shuriken had begun. Hot blood slipped along the blade; a bow clattered to the ground; a body followed. The other man – why was there another man? – brought a short sword to bear, hammering the slippery defensive kunai out of her hand and swiping towards her stomach – 

She sprung back, slipping another knife into her hands during the backflip, charging low.

The kidney would make a good target; her blow partly glanced off his wrist, snagging on baggy clothes and barely hitting true. 

The burly man let go of his sword, right wrist hanging useless and shredded.

He fell to his knees slowly and heavily, pressing his good hand against the small stab wound at his side.

His face was rapidly losing color. “You…,” he started. His small eyes rolled in his head before finding focus again. 

“….Pink…. you…pink?” His eyes slipped shut with a groan that could be either pain or a laugh. He slumped over.

Silence descended. In Sakura’s ears her heart still ran a staccato beat, but her breath was the loudest noise outside her body.

A cough forced itself past her lips. Her chest hurt. 

Slowly, she sank into a crouch and counted her breaths, like they learned at the academy. Slowly, her heartbeat calmed. Slowly, the blood rushing in her ears quieted down.

She felt a shudder run down her back, that nearly interrupted her breathing exercise. Cooling sweat clung to her back and neck and face and made her hair stick uncomfortably. 

When she felt like she could control her limbs again she carefully stretched, checking herself over for injuries. Apart from a few scratches and sore ligaments from too fast movements she was unwounded. 

In the sudden stillness of the wood, Naruto’s blue eyes flashed across her vision for a second. They sent only a clone. That meant… Did that mean, they couldn’t afford to send the real one? 

It would make sense for Gato to coordinate a kidnapping attempt with Zabuza’s attempt on Tazuna’s life.

Should she… should she join them on the bridge? Did they need her? What if Zabuza’s fake hunter nin was too strong?

But hadn’t clone-Naruto said something about ‘the rest’? The rest of what? Of the men sent for Tsunami and Inari? 

Rustling in the bushes interrupted her vacillating thoughts. 

She gripped the bloody kunai more tightly and trained her eyes on the undergrowth that kept moving with breaking twigs. 

It moved in her direction.

“Sakura?”, a scratchy voice that she didn’t recognize said from under some big-leaved bushes. 

Warily, she took a step back.

“You Sakura-kun?”, the voice said again. This time, the pointy face of a dog with a reddish - white coat peeked out from under the leaves.

“Erm…”

“Look like her. K’kashi said you’d ‘ave pink hair,” the… greyhound – wasn’t he a bit small for that, though – continued, eyeing her up and down critically.

“You good, girl?”

“Erm…” Sakura felt her brain turning in circles, trying to compute the speaking dog that had just turned up. Because Kakashi-sensei had sent him? How was that even – 

“Oh, for the Sage’s sake,” the dog muttered and rolled his large eyes, “Ne’er seen a summon, girl?”

“You’re… Kakashi-sensei’s summon?”

He levelled an unimpressed look at her. “Tha’s what I just said. Uhei’s the name. So, on to business; you fine, girl?”

He asked the question in the exact same tone of voice as the first time as if he simply changed the records and went back to playing what was on, before. She got the vague impression that Uhei wasn’t really good at… people; dogs; whatever. 

Back to business, huh?

“I’m fine,” Sakura answered the serious dog, “no notable injuries.”

The greyhound looked skeptical for a second, but recovered with an awkward movement that might have been his interpretation of a shrug.

“What about tha’ big human wi’ the sword?”

Quizzically, Sakura glanced over at the figure of the man.

“He’s… erm… dead?”, she ventured.

“You askin’ or tellin’?”

“…Telling.” Sakura frowned at Uhei and straightened her shoulders. “He’s dead.”

“Is not.” Was the succinct reply from the greyhound. “I c’n hear his heart. An’ his breath. Unconscious, though. Loosin’ blood.”

Oh.

Sakura felt stricken. He was still alive? What if he woke up? What if he- 

“How many people crossed sensei’s perimeter,” Sakura asked, eyes fastened on the large man that had tried to kill her. Her mind was whirling. Should she just kill him? Now? An unconscious man? Could she, even?

“Las’ coun’ when I left, twelve.”

That was… a lot, she thought faintly, heart suddenly hammering. 

“Did-,” her voice wavered pathetically, and she had to clear her throat before she tried again, “did Kakashi-sensei… Is someone else coming?” 

Sasuke-kun? Naruto-idiot? Anyone other than just a dog? 

“No. He sent me.” Uhei’s voice sounded tight but whether with suppressed anger or concern, Sakura didn’t know. “They are pr’bly fighting on the bridge. We’ll be enough.”

A girl and a dog. The jumbled mess of thoughts in her hindbrain stilled slowly. Alone against twelve mercenaries. 

Well, ten, now.

And only mercenaries. That was... good? No... but likely manageable. There were calm calculations drifting at the back of her mind. 

Slowly, she tightened the lax grip on her kunai again and went to kneel next to the downed man’s head. If this was a scenario in an academy test…

Swiftly, Sakura ran the knife across the man’s neck. 

Halfway through, her blade scratched on something hard – his spine; too much force, Sakura acknowledged, surprised by her own clinical mind, surprised by the fact that the tissue was so soft to begin with but – there was no tension because he was unconscious and – 

Silently, she wiped down the weapon on the man’s stained tunic. 

“How long ago did he notice the perimeter breach,” she asked the now quiet dog. Her voice felt eerie in her own ears.

“Bi’ more than thir’y minutes ago. I was sen’ out twen’y minutes later when the loud one’s clone popped ‘n boss noticed ‘nother couple people crossin’ his seal line.”

Considering the edge of sensei’s perimeter and the time lapsed that didn’t leave her with a lot of time. Ten minutes, quarter of an hour tops until the other men would arrive. 

“I c’n lead you to them,” Uhei offered, “Tha’s what I’m good at. Hunting ‘n’ catching ‘n’ rending.” 

He pulled up his lips in a mimicry of a human smile. Kakashi-sensei had sent her not a warhound but a hunter’s best weapon. Closing her eyes, Sakura took a slow, deep breath and clung to the unexpected stillness that teased the edges of her uncoordinated fight-or-flight reponse. 

She shuddered. The cold forest air sat tight against her sweaty skin.

“Okay then,” she whispered, “we hunt.”

***

A quick count of her remaining equipment left her with little options. Not enough shuriken to realistically take everyone down with them; not enough kunai either. Negligible amount of wire; a handful of exploding tags and no further flash tag. 

“Then how’s your Taijutsu,” Uhei asked while they swiftly tracked the way the two mercenaries had come from.

“Weak.”

Precise but weak. A ball of lead sat in Sakura’s stomach when she admitted to it. What use was precision if her hits didn’t matter.

“Ninjutsu?”

Sakura didn’t even answer that one. She hadn’t ever bothered to go beyond the academy curriculum. Prodigious ninjutsu knowledge was the one thing that would see her graduated faster than she could say ‘Shuriken’ if coupled with the rest of her scores. 

She felt Uhei glance at her. If his face was human there’d probably be a deep frown on it.

“My throwing is okay,” she offered instead, “98 on moving targets…” 

In the end, they decided to go with a simple exploding trap as distraction. Sakura rigged most of her remaining exploding tags to go off on a pressure activation via wire; thinking for a second she extended the time delay to account for non-shinobi speed. 

“I’ll hound them from the rear,” Uhei whispered, “and corral ‘em between your trees. C’n you make two bunshin tha’ look like me?”

She could. They moved awkwardly and would dispel on contact but that shouldn’t matter as long as the real Uhei was intimidating enough. 

The sound of humans moving through the forest grew closer.

“Hide,” was the last thing the hound said before vanishing in the thick undergrowth, this time without moving a single twig.

Sakura stood alone between the trees. Human voices drew ever nearer.

Quickly, she scaled one of the sturdier trees, trying to blend in with the leaves. It was hard, hiding in a red dress with white stitching. With bright pink hair. How stupid she was, to let her farce go on so long and so far.

A long howl sounded.

Sakura palmed a handful of shuriken, waiting.

Shouting started up, angry first, then more fearful, louder, coming closer. 

Her trap laid in the one path that was mostly free of shrubbery and other obstacles. For the mercenaries it was the natural trail to take. 

The first two of the men reached the pressure trigger. And ran over it in long strides, not activating it.

Sakura froze. What should she do now? If she started the fight, the rest would not come through and she’d be in danger of getting caught in the blast if the trap was activated later on and - 

A group of four broke though the trees, hot on the heel of the first two.

One of them triggered the trap. Two steps, three steps… four.

Sakura squinted when the light of six discharging exploding tags reached her eyes. Sound followed close after. 

Ears ringing, her shuriken went flying through the tail end of the blast, one lodged fortunate into the throat of a new arrival, bringing him down instantly. The others cutting tendons and muscles. 

There was no thinking, afterwards.

She slipped down her tree.

Growling sounded, someone barreled past her, lopsided, missing an arm from shoulder down.

She swiped at his unprotected side, kunai cutting deep, slipping out of her grip.

Uhei flew past her, a bloody snarl on his lips. He spared her no glance, hot on the trail of the first two men that had missed the trap.

A knife bit into her hip unexpectedly.

Hot agony traveled up her left side as she turned from the blow. A new kunai parried a large knife on instinct.

The lanky man bore down on her, second knife coming in.

His hair was burned away, skin blistering red where it wasn’t blackish.

There was a flash of fear distantly racing through her chest, when her injured side gave ground. Then her other hand found its grip on a shuriken and she flicked it up towards cutting into his unprotected neck. 

Sakura followed it up with a kunai.

She swiped blood from her eyes; it wasn’t hers, was it? Was she bleeding? 

Someone ran. 

Away from her.

None of the men surrounding her were left standing.

Uhei’s growls were getting farther away, someone was screaming and then stopped.

Something acrid burned against her palate when Sakura inhaled, and she suddenly had to fight the urge to retch. She coughed instead, trying to burrow her nose and mouth in the crook of her arms. The lack of sleeves on her dress nearly made her cry.

Air burning in her nose, eyes watering, Sakura looked around.

Before she could do more than take in the broken bodies – there was an arm over there and was that even… - Uhei returned, fur matted with blood. 

And tissue. Sakura could definitely see bits of tissue clinging to his sides. And between his teeth.

“All done,” he said, voice still more growl than human tongue. 

“G..good.” Her voice caught on the stench of burnt flesh. 

“You’re no’, though. Those two o’er there an’ this one are still breathing.”

One of the indicated men was regaining consciousness. It wouldn’t do him any good. The explosion had ripped off most of one leg and badly burnt his side. 

“They’re… they don’t matter, do they,” Sakura said, weakly.

At this, Uhei turned his full attention on her. Sakura vaguely acknowledged that she, too, would run, if the greyhound started to growl at her now.

“Don’t leave prey alive,” the hound said. His voice was perfectly precise, no trace of the slurring speech impediment he had shown before. 

“Make sure your prey is dead before you leave to report.” 

Was Uhei quoting someone?

“When you catch your target, kill it swiftly.”

It sounded like a set of instructions he had learned by heart. Even the modulation of Uhei’s voice was slightly different.

Uhei was Kakashi-sensei’s summon. 

Oh.

Sakura dropped her arms from their useless place in front of her nose. 

Uhei was quoting from Kakashi-sensei’s training. Sensei had taught his summons to hunt for the kill. 

“I understand,” she whispered. They didn’t sound like the normal shinobi tenets; was sensei… what had been his job? Before Team Seven?

“Then ge’ on with it, girl.”

She shelved the thought next to the new knowledge that kunai could get stuck on the spine when slitting a throat and nodded once. 

It didn’t feel worse now than when she had done it the first time, with the archer’s partner.

Oddly enough, when she was finished it started snowing. 

***

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew... almost done with wave~~~ ^^


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are some conversations that probably need to happen. Sakura is glad to leave Wave behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter of the Wave mission. After, Canon starts to slipslide sideways... 
> 
> Thanks to Cherryberry123 I now corrected this... thing... with punctuating dialogue. I hope I got most of it! (Though it's probably going to be a recurring issue, seeing as I have to sift through 98 pages of writing:/)

* * *

***

**On** Uhei’s command, Sakura and he had scoured the forest for any other of Gato’s mercenaries but had come up empty handed. 

There had been a few minutes of tense confusion when a group of four men, armed to their teeth had come running down the street leading away from Tazuna’s village but they had seemed intent enough on getting away, fast, that they decided to just observe. 

The fear on their faces had been a relieve to Sakura. 

If Gato’s men were fleeing in fear, then Team Seven had come out the winner. 

After that, they decided to turn back to Tazuna’s home.

When they arrived, the snow was gone, and the midday sun beat down from the clear sky and warmed the wooden pier in front of the house. If she disregarded the arrows, it looked as if nothing had happened. 

Her bowl of breakfast rice still sat half-eaten at the water’s edge. 

Half-heartedly, she called out to Tsunami-san. The woman thanked her for the all-clear but decided to remain behind closed doors with her son until her father turned up.

Sakura scooped up the lone rice bowl on the ground, eying it blankly. She probably shouldn’t let the food go to waste; Wave Country had little enough as it was. Her stomach felt queasy, though, probably with how empty it was by now.

Her hands looked dark against the pristine white of the grains. 

Carefully she set the bowl back down and took a few steps back. She rubbed at the reddish stains and soot on her skin. It smeared and part of it peeled off in sticky little crumbs.

Her throat worked involuntarily for a second before she forced it into a dry swallow instead of a retch.

Uhei’s head perked up suddenly, where he was sitting in the sun close to the front door. 

“Boss is coming,” he said, “along wi’ the pups and the drunk.”

Sakura barely had time to think about how she should probably not hide on the roof – and why would she suddenly want that, in any case – when Uhei’s tail began wagging and Sasuke and Naruto rounded the corner, followed by Kakashi-sensei and Tazuna.

Sasuke leaned heavily on the blond boy’s shoulder, pale but there was no blood to be seen on him. Naruto babbled a mile a minute and lit up like a miniature sun the second he spied Sakura.

“Hey Sakura-chan! We won! We totally kicked ass like you wouldn’t believe and-“ 

“You Idiot!” Sakura didn’t know when she had moved in front of him. She barely stopped herself from giving him a good wallop across the head – her hands would smear blood and soot all over his hair – and instead stomped heavily on his foot. 

“Yiaaaaauuuuhhhh!!! What was that for? Sakura-chan! What did I do?”

Naruto hopped on his good foot, dislodging Sasuke who swayed dangerously for a second. 

“What did - !?” Sakura felt incandescent with rage and her eyes burned and she would – not – cry. 

“You – the arrow –,“ was all she could force out between uncooperating lips, the scene of Naruto – the clone! – being hit fatally overlaying reality. 

“Oh… aaahhhh… Sakura-chaaaan!” Naruto, the idiot, waved his hands in front of her face apologetically. “I didn’t mean to! And it was only a clone! And did you know that my clones can …” He babbled on and on, something about his clones relaying information when they were destroyed and Sasuke's new fancy eyes but Sakura barely listened. 

Yes, just a clone. She shuddered. 

Naruto, dragging a lagging Sasuke behind him, threw open the door with a shout of “Inari! The heroes are back,” barely evading a still high-strung and frightened Tsunami’s swing with her frying pan. Sasuke ducked obligingly out of the way of the utensil, gave the woman a weird look and shrugged it of with his usual disinterest. 

Sakura watched the Naruto-and-Sasuke-show from outside, feeling suddenly removed by more than just the door.

There were still arrows stuck in its metal fitting.

Nobody had noticed them. Or the dried blood that dyed her outfit and skin a splotchy reddish-brown. 

Tazuna pushed past her small frame and joined the chaos inside. 

The door fell close behind him.

Sakura took a step back, then another, not knowing weather it was a grin or a snarl or something else entirely that tried to twist her lips over her teeth.

A hand suddenly clamped down on her shoulder.

She turned, ducking, but the injured muscle on her left hip burned and gave in and she grasped for her weapons but there were no shuriken left – 

“Calm down, Sakura.”

She finished her turn on her knees, the familiar voice draining the panic nearly instantly. 

“…Hi… Kakashi-sensei,” she said, feeling awkward, instead of lobbing shuriken.

Wincing, she tried to stand but sank down to her knees again. “You.. ahhh… surprised me…”

He took her elbow to help her up and offered what passed as a small smile on his covered face. 

“You’re injured.” It was a statement, not a question but still, Sakura nodded. 

“I got caught when…,” she trailed off, “Did Uhei tell you what happened already?”

“I got his report, yes.” He eyed her intently. “You did very well, Sakura. Better than I hoped.” He glanced at the greyhound lying in the sun. “Uhei said, he wouldn’t mind working with you again.”

“Oh…thanks, I guess?”

Her face felt hot. Very well? Better than he hoped? What a curious mixture of making her feel small and complementing her.

Kakashi-sensei hummed thoughtfully, still watching her closely. “I don’t think he ever had to work with a Genin before. So, take it as high praise.”

She didn’t quite know what to answer to that, so she just nodded and tried for a smile. The hound that had been trained to kill wouldn’t mind working with her again. That was…what was she supposed to do with this kind of compliment? 

Considering the light frown on sensei’s face, her smile was a mile off from looking genuine. 

“I’d like your report as well, Sakura. Your fight started a good while earlier than his." His gaze slid over the abused barrels and stuck arrows. "It looks like it was an interesting one.”

So, report, she did. And if sensei looked furious at the part about Naruto’s stunt with the clone, well, the idiot could do with a bit of a dressing down. 

*** 

There was, Sakura thought, nothing quite as off-putting as a serious and sad Uzumaki Naruto. She was so used to his ever-present smiles and loud boisterous voice that the sight of the lone boy standing quietly in front of two unmarked graves sent her terribly off-kilter. 

“She was really nice, ya know?” he mumbled when Sakura reached a spot behind his left shoulder. “He, I mean. He’s a he. Was a he.”

The words didn’t make a lot of sense to her but she nodded nevertheless. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. But he died for Zabuza, ya know? And I s’ppose that’s what Haku meant when he said, he wants to protect his precious people?”

It sounded like a question but Sakura wasn’t sure if an answer was required of her. Naruto had his hands stuck in his pockets and stared listlessly at the graves.

The wind blowing from the ocean whipped a few stray hairs out of her bun and made her shiver despite herself. There was a headache pounding behind her eyes to the beat of her heart. When Sakura was just about to give up and offer at least some kind of platitude to the brooding boy in order to get out of the wind, his expression cleared up.

“I think I like that,” he said, thoughtful but decidedly, “becoming strong to care for my precious people.” 

He turned around and Sakura offered him a smile. He grinned back, mood obviously lifted by whatever resolution he had just come to and started back down the small hill off the road. They had dug the graves for Zabuza and Haku outside the village borders, hidden from curious eyes.

Sasuke, who was inconspicuously pretending not to wait for them, joined them at the foot of the hill. There was a streak of mud running along his jawline and several clumps of dirt in his windswept hair from when he had gotten into an earth-shoveling contest with Naruto.

Sakura averted her eyes before she could blush.   
  
“So, so, so what happened on your end, Sakura-chan? Kaka-sensei was really angry ‘bout that clone thing but I kinda didn’t get it. What was the big deal?” 

Naruto had his face set in a squinty scowl at the memory of Kakashi-sensei’s lecture. Stubbornness practically radiated off him and Sakura debated for a second if it was worth it to delve into why, exactly, that had been such a shitty move but that would mean she’d have to talk about her fight and the phantom sensation of sticky blood between her fingers made her queasy, already.  
  
“I… um. There were some of Gato’s men that wanted to kidnap Tsunami-san and Inari, I guess,” she explained, lackluster.

“Ooooh, sheesh, those assholes turned up at the bridge, too! At least fifty! Or a hundred!”

Something complicated flitted across his expression for a second before it settled on a too bright grin.

“But Kaka-sensei totally beat them up, no problem!”

“It… wasn’t as many with me,” Sakura offered, uncomfortable. She knew that the villagers had been out to dig graves since dawn. Had they also taken care of the bodies in the forest? More likely, that was where Kakashi-sensei had disappeared to, after breakfast. “I think sensei took care of them today.” 

Sasuke rolled his eyes. “It wasn’t a hundred, dumbass. And Kakashi and Zabuza didn’t ‘beat them up’. They killed them.”

“Yeah, well, it was a lot! No need to get prissy, teme!”

Predictably, Naruto fumed at the condescending correction of his rival until something else occurred to him. “And he didn’t have to kill them, really. I mean, why would…,” he trailed off, looking lost, “couldn’t he have just – I dunno, scared them away? Why would he…” 

Sasuke turned away, hands in pocket, and Sakura just knew that anything out of his mouth right then would probably end in an epic row. He could be insensitive like that. Swallowing against her dry throat she struggled for an answer Naruto could accept.  
  
“I guess, sometimes you just don’t have a choice,” she offered, mind not quite with her teammates but rather struggling to stay away from the carnage Uhei and she had wrought. In her fight, there hadn’t been one, had there?

“If you’re not strong enough or-“

“But Kaka-sensei’s plenty strong!”

Sakura glared half-heartedly at the interruption. “Not everyone is. And didn’t he fight Zabuza before that? And anyway, who is there to make sure they stay away, when we go back home? There’s no prison here or police or anything, really.”

There was a mulish expression on Naruto’s face. 

“I still don’t like it.”

Sakura shrugged, done with this conversation. 

“Sometimes, it’s your duty and when there’s no choice, you just have to,” she repeated, voice clipped and so, so glad that she hadn’t said anything substantial about her own experience.

Make sure your prey is dead before you leave to report, she repeated to herself. Her mind overwrote Uhei’s words with sensei’s smooth, detached voice. 

It fit.

Naruto stayed silent at noticing her plummeting mood and walked ahead of them in large stomping steps. 

Sasuke’s gaze burned at the side of her head and when she turned to him the look on his face felt like a bucket of water down her back. 

“Tch.”

Cold tar settled in her stomach at the derisive noise. What would the fangirl know about killing and duty. She clenched her fists when he passed her. 

The silent disregard – no different than usual - suddenly stung.

***

It took Tazuna another 2 weeks to finally finish his bridge. 

By then, traffic by boat had already picked up again, business slowly, warily returned and there was a general air of relief over the small island and its sister islands when, instead of Gato’s remaining thugs returning, a few of the older but far removed noble families of Nami no Kuni preemptively set up a small base close to the bridge. 

There’d be a toll, paid to them for transporting wares across it and Tazuna couldn’t stop grumbling into his sake about it but it wasn’t a heavy one and Sakura thought the small army base would probably bring some much-needed stability to the islands. 

Also, she got the impression that Kakashi-sensei had somehow had a hand in that, what with several disappearing acts and several of his summons covertly coming and leaving with scrolls. 

And if there was an accord reached about how payment for the knowingly underrated mission was dealt with, then that was solely between stoic Kakashi-sensei, pale and trembling Tazuna and a stern but contrite Tsunami. 

Sakura really didn’t want to be involved. 

The two weeks of boring guard duty for Sasuke and Naruto at the bridge was exactly the time Sakura needed to get her cold treated, that had set back in the night after digging the graves. 

She stayed under Tsunami’s strict purview for the first few days of hacking coughs and shivering fever. Contrary to Kakashi-sensei, the young mother had a decidedly less slipshod approach to treating a cold and Sakura was stuffed choke full of cups of bitter sage tea, soups and other civilian-approved treatments. 

Also, she wasn’t allowed to leave the bed for the first four days which had led to a few awkward instances of Sakura hiding behind curtains and assorted inventory trying desperately not to cough and be caught.

It also led to an awkward conversation in one such hiding place, smooched in between an overflowing coat crack and the shoe cupboard. 

The little boy had nearly bowled over the coat rack when he found the small space already occupied and only quick maneuvering on Sakura’s part kept them from being discovered by his mother, sweeping the front porch. 

“What are you doing here?”, Inari asked, baffled.

She shot him a dark look. 

“Hiding.”

“Why?”

“I was taking a walk when your mother nearly caught me,” Sakura whispered, feeling sullen. What was wrong with taking a walk? If she didn’t stretch her injured hip, the muscles would probably heal all bunched up wrongly.

She didn’t have to acknowledge that laying in bed all day and napping made her heart race with remembered explosions and growls and screams. She hated waking up to the imagined scent of burning skin and hair.

“And you?”

In answer he stretched his short arms around Sakura’s back.

For a second she had the thought that he was trying to grope her backside but-

When he pulled his arm back there was an arrow in his grip. Sakura felt her hand jerk involuntarily at some sort of odd fight or flight instinct. Instead, she gripped her fingers tightly, turning to face the boy with suddenly tense shoulders.

“Why did you keep that?”

Belatedly, she realized that it was her own voice she was hearing. 

Inari frowned down at the weapon in his hands then at her, lip between his teeth. 

“I want to…,” he trailed off again. Then he squared his shoulders and looked straight at her with his head high.

“I want to remember that you were so brave! I … we were hiding, and I was so afraid… and you just…” His hands tightened on the arrow shaft.

Sakura was flummoxed. He wanted to keep the arrow to remember how brave she was. Things like that only happened to Naruto! Or in stupid Shonen manga! 

“You fought them, and you won, and they stopped coming after us, and your teacher told my mum that there were even more of them that you defeated and…” He took a deep gulp of air before he went on in a quieter whisper. “I was so scared, and you were so brave. I want to be brave like you. Even though you’re a girl and you have pink hair.”

And then he had to go and bungle it up.

Tsunami-san had not been amused when she had to separate Sakura, coughing deeply, hand fisted into the boy’s hair, and her kid trying to stick an arrow into said girl’s stomach.   
  
Finally, though, the bridge was completed, and the team was prying away Naruto from a crying Inari – and Sakura wanted to un-see the strand of pink-dyed hair that was hardly hidden within his dark mane – and they moved out.

The journey that had taken them more than a week on the way here, was over before the fourth day had run out of steam.

And thinking about steam…

Sakura eyed her blond teammate apprehensively. If he got any redder from anger, he’d probably screech like a tea kettle.

“Tempura,” Sasuke said in a deadpan voice.

“How… HOW can you even…it’s ramen!” 

Naruto sounded apoplectic with rage. Sakura had no idea what the argument was even about. 

“…nope. Still tempura.” 

Sakura chanced a glance at Sasuke. The corners of his mouth were lifted just the slightest bit. Well, who would have thought. He did actually enjoy riling Naruto up.

A raised eyebrow asked her to offer her own opinion on the matter. Caught flat-footed that Sasuke of all people demanded her input, she tried to get a read on the topic of conversation. 

“…erm… Zaru Soba,” Sakura finally answered decisively.

At Sasuke’s baffled look and Naruto’s despairing scream, Kakashi-sensei slammed his book shut.

“Aaaaand on that disconcertingly slippery note… let’s see who’s first at the gates.” He vanished in a puff of chakra smoke, Naruto hot on his invisible heels.

Sasuke shot her another vaguely horrified glance before he set of after them.

“What… did I say?” 

***

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm on vacation in 2 weeks - yes, I know, this sounds impossible under the circumstances but I swear it's the truth! There'll be sand and ocean and more sand and hopefully nice weather.
> 
> Why this concerns you? Because it interferes with my update schedule, of course... Just to let you know, I'll update a week late!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura meets friends and familiy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been remiss in answering your comments! I'm sorry, I promise to do better... (I do read them, of course!)
> 
> Quick question from the dummies corner: How do I manage to leave the end-note of the first chapter but NOT have it show up for every other chapter where I select Chapter Notes at the end? This has me stumped for a while now and I don't want the old one to show up again from here on out... Help, please?

* * *

**Sakura’s** lungs burned, her chest ached with every inhale, the nearly healed stitches on her left hip twinged and exhilaration swept through her. 

She was nearly there, training ground thirteen was within her sight, her second round circling the village was nearly-

Something green raced past her, upsetting enough leaves and dust that her eyes watered. She wheezed with the dirt filling her nostrils. What had that – 

Another green something flashed past her, this time clipping her elbow and forcing her into an ungainly twirl to avoid falling.

“So soooorryyyy, kunoichi-saaaan….!”

The screamed apology faded into the distance.

“What… was that?!”

***

Notwithstanding the weird encounter that morning, Sakura thought her day had been pretty successful so far. 

Kakashi-sensei had given them a few days leave after they had gotten back to the village. The normally standard mission report had been upgraded into a direct debrief with the Hokage. While the boys were given a pass on the report completely, Sakura had been asked by Kakashi-sensei to hand in a separate one, for the unforeseen side mission of preventing a kidnapping and eliminating mercenaries. 

She had turned it in first thing in the morning, treating herself to a breakfast of green tea and cinnamon buns afterwards before starting on her light jog around the village. Managing two rounds on her first try was a pretty uplifting experience. It certainly chased away the lingering lethargy from having woken up too early. 

Stretching out tired muscles, Sakura flopped on her back after finishing her last set of crunches. There was no reason to shy away from training any longer. Competing with Ino over who had the slimmer waist and the longer hair wasn’t relevant for anything anymore. Dainty hands didn’t mean ‘save from graduation’, they meant ‘useless in a fight’. 

And speaking of long hair… Sakura held up a loose strand of pink hair, damp from training all day, split ends already creeping in after three weeks of neglecting her previous care routine.

She should probably trim it; or, at least use her conditioner again.

It was just…

She had started to grow it out when she had made the decision to botch her physical shinobi training.

It signified a flaw she had consciously chosen to display. She had grown it long to say, ‘look at me, I care more for being beautiful than for being dangerous’. It had made her the same as all the other girls in her class.

She let the strands of pink slip limply out from between her fingers. She didn’t even particularly like having long hair.

Ino had loved it, though. 

Sweat tacky on her face, she levered herself up again. Another, clean rendition of her red and white quipao dress stuck wetly to her back and she shivered when it was exposed to a refreshing late spring breeze.

Chugging down the tepid rest of her water bottle, Sakura eyed the empty remains of her lunchtime bento. Her stomach gurgled pitiful. It had swiftly adapted to being fed regularly sized portions, after the protein restricting diets she had forced herself into so far. 

It looked like some shopping had to be done. Considering that her parents hadn’t been home the evening before nor come back during the night she would probably have to tough it out herself. 

And she should probably check the Genin mission roster for information on her parents’ assignments, at one point. 

A short while later, Sakura found herself ambling across the marketplace by Nidaime Koen, the only one of Konoha’s markets that was open until late in the evening. Little restaurants and colorful Yatai clustered around the park’s circumference and supplied eager patronage to the late-night market.

Sipping on a thick milkshake to tide her over until dinner, Sakura was just considering a large slab of pork belly at the butcher’s stand when a grating voice cut into her thoughts.

It wasn’t as if Yamanaka Ino naturally had a unpleasant voice. She hit the shrill tones mostly, when there was a competition about Sasuke going on or if she was being aggressive to deflect others.

“Look who the cat dragged back in,” she said, Shikamaru slumping in her shadow beneath the tight grip she had on his sleeve. Choji and their teacher, Sarutobi something or other, came up slowly behind them. Sakura gave the three of them a vague smile and bow in greeting.

“Hi Ino-pig,” she offered blandly. 

“Forehead-girl, back from the wild…” Ino’s eyes raked over her form, taking in her scuffed sandals, sweat-stained clothes and dusty skin, reddish from being exposed to the sun all day. “Did you get inspired by the local wildlife out there? You look like you rolled around with the boars all day.” She took an exaggerated sniff in Sakura’s direction. “You smell like it, too.”

Ino seemed like she was on a roll today. After years of playing the same game, Sakura easily found the tightened corners of Ino’s eyes, the way she was all but strutting and putting up a glossy front. Deflecting then, Sakura interpreted, and maybe hoping for information on her teammates, or rather, Sasuke.

Giving the pork belly a last glance, she tried to scratch together the edges of her academy persona. 

“I’ll take it from you,” Sakura finally said, probably a tad too slow to react, “You’d know all about rolling with any type of pigs, Ino-pig.”

Sakura was sure that her tone of voice was off; it was too… disinterested? Or too cutting? Too something, in any case, and not girly enough. Discomfited, Sakura tried to play it off by flipping her hair and turning back to the butcher’s selection. It should be easier than that to get back into her role; it hadn’t been that long, after all.

She had liked being able to let it go.

“At least I remember how to care for my hair, Forehead-disaster,” Ino sniffed, “and… oh my GOD! What is that!?”

Ino’s hand suddenly clamped around Sakura’s that was holding her milkshake, eying her fingers in clear disgust.

There was a moment of disconnect.

She did get all the blood off, didn’t she? Sakura frantically tried to remember how her fingers had looked this morning when she had scrubbed them again. There wasn’t anything! It had originally taken several soaks to get it out from under her nails but- 

Ino tugged harshly at her hand. 

Did she miss a spot?

She sharply turned her wrist, second hand coming up to twist Ino’s own towards her forearm and putting pressure on it. With a pained yelp, Ino let go of her hand.

The half-full milkshake cup clattered onto the street and spilled its foamy content over the cobble stones.

She glanced briefly at her nails – there was, of course, no blood; how stupid of her, it had been weeks! – and put her arms on her hips, slightly shaking fingers carefully curled inwards. She should probably invest into something with pockets, just in case. Stupid Ino. What had even gotten her so worked up today.

Ino was massaging her wrist and something a bit meaner than usual settled on her face. 

“Ohhhh, someone’s really defensive about her cuticles.” Her blue eyes were narrowed. “You should better worry about fitting into that garish dress, the way you’ve been eyeing the fatty meat over there.”

“Ouch, that’s mean, Ino,” Choji said concernedly, putting down his bag of chips in favour of frowning at the two girls. 

“Ino, let it go,” Shikamaru cut in, elbowing his teammate slightly. He was no longer slouching, and his gaze rested on her hands, suspicious. 

But Ino had overextended, Sakura decided, her eyes catching on the way her skirt kept riding higher on her hips with every movement and how its edges dug into the bandages underneath. It looked just this side of too tight. Deflecting, indeed. 

“Don’t take it out on me that you could barely fit into your skirt this morning,” she answered, without effort to sound anything other than dismissively bland, “try a size bigger or it might hinder you in training.”

Silence descended. 

Ino’s face went slack and a suspicious sheen entered her eyes, hands involuntarily pushing down the garment in question. Choji’s gaze flew from Ino to Sakura and Shikamaru took a small step forward. 

A telling reaction on his part, Sakura catalogued, very defensive.

Their sensei just shook his head, cigarette hanging unlit between his fingers, something like resignation on his face. 

“You’re one of Hatake’s Genin, aren’t you?”

A healthy amount of dismay colored his voice. He didn’t seem to be a fan of either Kakashi-sensei or the fact that she was his Genin, or both.

Sakura nodded curtly, corner of her eyes still on Ino. That was real hurt she saw there. A hot feeling swepy uncomfortably through her belly and eradicated her hunger pains. 

“I didn’t realize he would impart his own people skills onto his students that fast,” he said. He put the cigarette to his lips and casually lightened it with a snip of his fingers. He took a deep drag. “It’s certainly not something to be proud of.”

He corralled his students in the direction of the restaurants on the other side of the marketplace, Ino conveniently ushered into their midst, leaving Sakura with nothing but a censuring look.

Watching their backs, feeling out of sorts with herself, regret and indignation battled behind her ribs. 

“Ey miss. ‘ave you finally decided on som’ting? Ye’re holdin’ up business ‘ere.” She gave the harried butcher a vague smile and perused his wares, mind empty. 

In the end, she decided to buy the tenderloin.

*** 

It was the middle of the night when Sakura heard the door to their modest house open. Their obligatory traps didn’t go off. She probably wouldn’t have noticed at all, if she hadn’t been up anyway, trying to calm down after… 

Sakura successfully shoved thoughts of her nightmare down with another gulp of the cool water cupped in her trembling hands. 

Relief made her limbs lighter when the telltale uneven gate of her mother reached her sensitive ears.

Not bothering to be silent, she took the steps down, four at once and skidded into the living room, sometimes doubling as all-purpose room, that connected to the genkan and front door. 

“Mum! You’re back!” 

Her mother turned, face lighting up in a tired smile. 

“Sakura, when did you get home?”

She opened her arms and Sakura wasted no second to embracie her. She was glad too; her mum was not the cuddly type and Sakura cherished every opportunity to snag one of her strong hugs. Since Haruno Mebuki had reactivated her Genin status those opportunities had dwindled along with the times the whole family was home together.

“I came home a week ago,” Sakura finally answered the question. 

“Ahhh, I already thought we’d probably miss you when we were sent out…” 

Her mum tightened her hold around Sakura’s slim frame for a second. “Are you okay? It feels like you’re growing some nice muscles there…”

“I’m fine, now.”

Sakura buried her head in the fabric of her mother's coarse, loose standard shinobi top. The mesh underneath was an unused hardness against her cheek. Then she sniffed and drew back. There was a smoky and metallic tang overlaying the usual crisp pine scent from her mum's favorite soap. 

Sakura took half a step back. Her mother’s arms slipped off her shoulders.

“Are you hurt, mum?” 

Her eyes raked over her form but with the moonlight through the window being the only illumination Sakura couldn’t make out much. She shivered. She’d much rather be back with her mum’s arms around her.

“I’m fine, honey.” 

The smile she sent Sakura looked exhausted and not entirely genuine. Slowly, her mother crossed the living room into the kitchen and set a pot of water to boiling.

Sakura followed her closely. There was still something missing… someone.

Sakura’s heart lurched.

“You said you… Were you and dad sent out together?” 

Didn’t her mum have a standing assignment at the aviary? What was she doing out with her dad, he didn’t get along with birds at all! And hadn’t she learned that family and lovers were never on the same squad?

“We were. Oh, don’t scowl like that, honey. Sometimes there is an overlap or an unlucky reshuffling that ends like this. In this case, your father was already slated for the mission.”

“Oh. His usual one?”

Sakura was aware that her father was routinely requested for a caravan protection detail between Konoha and Suna with several stops in between. If they were back already, the caravan must have left shortly after Team Seven had headed out for Nami no Kuni. 

Her mother smiled slightly.

“Yes, that one. This time they had lumber, tea and bakery supplements.” She snorted. “Their combinations are getting wilder every year.”

The routine assignments brought semi-steady income for a Genin, which was a luxury that mostly only desk duties allowed for. And Haruno Kizashi was probably the last person in Konoha anyone wanted around their paperwork. Sakura was sadly aware of her father’s chaos after quite a few misplaced homework assignments she had mistakenly asked him to hold on to.

“Halfway to River, two of his teammates caught a stomach bug and someone at mission assignment decided that I was the best option to replace one of them. It was a coincidence, is all.”

Sakura accepted the cup of hot mint tea her mother handed her and settled at the table. 

“Then where is he now.”

Sakura knew her father. He’d be home by now, setting another small bead of Suna Glass on her desk, like he did every time he went there. By now she had a collection of 27 of the shimmering little ornaments. When she managed to get forty of them, she’d have enough to make a short necklace. Her dad had promised her one of those the very first time she had seen one of the merchants’ daughters wear one. That had been a bit more that five year ago, now.

They were expensive, though. Nothing for a single Genin salary that had to feed a family.

With all three of them as active shinobi they'd earn a sizable amount more, now. Even disregarding Sakura's split mission rewards and the loss of Mebuki's part-time work at the baker they'd more than double their income. Shinobi work - even just C-ranks - gave a considerably better bonus in addition to the basic Genin payroll than most common civilian jobs could offer as salary. 

Her mother set the cup down gently.

“We were caught in a raid two days from Sunagakure.” 

Sakura barely managed to keep a hold of her own cup.

“What –“

“It wasn’t too dangerous. We managed to drive them off quickly, but they got a few good hits in before they took off with the flour and soda. And you know your father. His defensive earth techniques aren’t the most stable.” She rolled her eyes fondly. 

Sakura could clearly remember at least four instances when one or another of his jutsu collapsed and he came back from the training fields, tracking mud, earth and on one memorable occasion, clay across their floors. Suna’s sand wouldn’t have made it any easier on him.

“So he’s fine?”

“It’s nothing life-threatening, honey. His earth dome collapsed and earned him a cut across his back that nicked his shoulder blade. He had the standard patch-up done in Suna but… you know…never trust an Iwa builder, a Kumo merchant…”

“… a Kiri diplomat or a Suna healer,” Sakura finished together with her mother, rolling her eyes fondly at the old saying. 

“So he’s getting it treated at the hospital now. And they’re trying to extract the poison.”

“The cut was poisoned?!”

Her mother blinked tiredly.

“Ah… not that cut. He also caught a kunai with his forearm. We weren’t sure. The medics said it was some neurotoxin.”

“Oh…” Sakura slumped in her chair, tired after the unintended scare. “So, he’s… going to be okay?” 

A fond smile sat on her mum’s lips. “Yes, honey. He’ll be fine. We can visit him in the morning, okay?”

“Okay.” 

“So, let’s get to bed, then. Why were you up, in the first place?” 

Watching her mum tidying up the used cups, line of her shoulders falling tiredly and smelling of smoke and blood, Sakura wanted nothing more than to go back to everything being familiar and homey again.

“… I needed the loo…,” she muttered, shoving the nightmare into a tiny box at the back of her mind to be thrown out later.

“Well then, off you go. I’ll be right behind you, but I do need a shower first.”

Sakura fell asleep to the sound of running water.

***

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura gets some training.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter's comments showed me that I really got you all to feel for Sakura! So glad that the intended effect was reached...  
> I also decided to update my Tags with "Unreliable Narrator" 
> 
> Just a thought... *twiddles thumbs*
> 
> Azy283 solved my problem for me! Thanks a lot!

* * *

“You’re late!” 

Naruto screamed at the top of his lungs. Sakura startled underneath the pages of the book she had used as a makeshift sunscreen for her face and rapidly blinked the grit out of her eyes. 

She’d probably overdone it the evening before with the chakra training. Sluggishly, she pulled herself to her feet and readjusted her hair into a topknot. 

“Yes, you’re…,” a yawn interrupted her, “…late, Kakashi-sensei.” 

“That’s not very convincing, Sakura-kun.” The man in question regarded her disappointedly over the top of his orange book. “Shall we try it again?”

“Don’t bother on my account.” 

Her sleepy mind ran off without consulting her first and her voice didn’t quite manage a pitch beyond ‘bland’. There was a snort behind her that sounded suspiciously like Sasuke. 

“Since you’re all so enthusiastic this fine morning, we’ll start with something new today.”

Sakura doubtfully eyed her teacher up and down. The humid heat of summer was already palpable even in the morning hours. She wasn’t sure if she wanted any part in whatever had Kakashi-sensei so obliging to offer training. The overt body language he projected sent tingles down her spine in discomfort. 

Naruto, in contrast, grinned broadly, hands behind his head. “So, we’re finally getting real training! What is it Kakashi-sensei? A jutsu? Since we know all about catra now ‘n stuff!”

“It’s chakra, air-head.” 

Sakura didn’t have to turn around to Sasuke to know that an eyeroll accompanied that statement. 

“What I said, what I said, bastard.” Naruto put his nose up but didn’t do much more than glare half-heartedly at his teammate. Sakura was sure he was much too buoyed by the prospect of learning a jutsu to get into a real fight with Sasuke. 

“Maahhh…,” Kakashi-sensei scratched his masked cheek, feigning deep thinking.

Sakura slumped where she was standing. The theatrics had her reasonably sure that it was not going to be a jutsu at all. 

“Today I was planning on something special… a form of … roleplay, if you will.”

Kakashi-sensei giggled unabashedly behind his book. Sakura felt heat creep into her cheeks. What was he on about?

“Oh, oh, oh, I know!” Naruto crowed, one arm wildly waving in the air like a violent rendition of a raised hand in a classroom, “Sakura plays the princess and you the enemy ninja and the bastard and I’ll have to rescue her with our super new jutsu!”

“Don’t be stupid, Idiot,” Sasuke bit out, “that’s not what he meant!” The tips of his ears burned bright red and a blush dusted his normally porcelain skin. His scowl was still a formidable thing, though.

“What’d he mean then, huh, bastard?!” Predictably, Naruto was instantly in Sasuke’s face.

“Yes, Sasuke, what else could I have possibly meant, hmmm?”

Kakashi-sensei’s eye-smile looked positively devious from where Sakura was standing. The blush on Sasuke’s face deepened. 

“How would I know?! Just not… that.” 

“Hah! You don’t know, bastard! So I’m right and we’ll actually –“ 

The orange book suddenly came down on Naruto’s head and interrupted him mid-shout.

“Nope.” 

The p even popped. Her teacher was the absolute worst. Naruto deflated comically. 

“Only Sakura will be roleplaying for this.”

Sakura was sure she was instantly beet red. “W..what?”

“But if only Sakura plays a princess… that doesn’t even work!” Naruto squinted confusedly around the group, one giggling teacher and two blushing teens. “Huh? What’d I miss?”

The urge to bury her face in her hands was overwhelming for a second. At least then, her cheeks would have the opportunity to cool down.

Finally putting his reading material away, Kakashi-sensei leaned down forebodingly and draped an arm across Sakura’s shoulders. Sakura didn’t dare to move when his other hand tugged at her messy topknot. 

“Sakura … will roleplay as… teacher!”

Playing a role, in any form, was probably something Kakashi-sensei was very familiar with, Sakura decided, annoyed. Though, his teacher-role left something to be desired.

Ten minutes later had everyone down at the water edge of the training ground’s artificial lake and Sakura was blushing for another reason altogether.

Without stopping even once, the boys had made a competition of who could rid themselves of their clothes fastest. Sasuke-kun was proving to be the winner. He was already down to his boxer shorts and shirt. She really shouldn’t stare and she totally was over that crush but… 

Suddenly, two fingers snapped in front of her face. 

“Earth to Sakura.” 

She turned her head so fast that her neck popped. 

Kakashi-sensei looked at her expectantly. Did she miss something? She tried giving him a smile while keeping Sasuke’s nice bu… Sasuke in her peripheral vision. 

“Erm… did you… Did you say something?” 

He stilled for a second and stared at her. If she didn’t know that Kakashi-sensei never showed any emotion apart from apathy or distant amusement she’d say that he looked dejected. 

Maybe she should apologize.

“I’m sorry but I got… lost – erm. In thought, I mean.” She stumbled awkwardly over her tongue. 

It didn’t look like that was the response he had been aiming for, though, judging by the hand that swept across his face. He muttered something indistinguishable about some guy and a beast before he shook it off. 

“I said, please show them water walking a few times. Explain if you want. When you’re finished, come meet me at the training posts. You’re doing something different today.”

His voice was terribly dry, and he wasted no second to poof away in obnoxious chakra smoke. 

Sakura had no idea what that had been about. She wasn’t inattentive all that often, was she? And she certainly wasn’t a beast. Or a guy. 

When Naruto and Sasuke had finally stopped shoving each other, Sakura stepped out onto the lake. Good timing, too, since she just barely managed to rescue Naruto’s orange jacket from drowning where it had been bobbing in the water. How had it even ended up there?

“Okay, so… ummm… this is also a chakra control exercise.” 

Predictably, Naruto looked dejected at the prospect.

“It’s not the same as tree walking though. You don’t really want to stick to the water surface, right? And it’s not like that approach would work anyway since water molecules aren’t stationary in their element and…” 

She cleared her throat. They didn’t really need to know this, did they? 

“Ummm… You have to increase your effective area of weight distribution to use the water’s natural surface tension. So… it’s much easier on a lake than on a river for example. And of course, you have to adapt the distribution for moving because friction is really low like this and also, account for movement in general…”

Sakura stopped herself. It didn’t look like either of her teammates had understood a word. How could she simplify this… or she could just borrow the generally lacking explanation Kakashi-sensei had given her.

“It takes more chakra than tree-walking. You need a steady stream to keep from sinking in.”

Naruto’s face instantly lit up. “Okay, Sakura-chan! I got this!”

She somehow doubted that but came off the lake anyway. Naruto started splashing.

Sasuke was still standing on his spot though, making no move towards the water. She stopped. He looked… uncomfortable. 

“Hn.”

“Umm, yes?”

His gaze flickered from her face slightly off to the side and back again. His obvious discomfort was nearly cute. Even if there was a scowl accompanying it as usual.

“Can you… may I… May I use the Sharingan to watch you. Walking on water, I mean.” A dusting of pink caught on the tips of his ears.

“Oh, of course. Of course, you can.” 

Was this etiquette for Sharingan users? She hadn’t ever thought about it but there had to have been rules in place for this, before. Otherwise, teamwork and comradery would probably always be sour.

She stepped back onto the lake, showing off several movements to give him more information to work with.

“Ah… thank you,” he finally said stiffly. His Sharingan flickered out. 

“Do you really see chakra like this?”

“Hn. Just it’s movement. Not when it’s static. Or when it’s molded inside the body.”

She thought for a moment. Then…

”You’ll still have to find out how to make your chakra behave like mine by yourself?”

“Seeing the effect helps,” he offered.

“That’s…good then,” She watched him turn around. His shoulders were hunched a bit, clearly uncomfortable.

“Hn.”

She left Sasuke to his own devices and turned to a soaked, yelling Naruto further down the muddy water edge. If Sasuke had his Sharingan helping him, then how could she even out the odds for Naruto?

A half forgotten, half repressed memory finally came to her as she ambled over to him. 

“How is it going, Naruto?”

The boy was in the water up to his thighs, dripping wet from head down, a determined glare on his face. 

“Hey, Sakura-chan! Didn’t see you here! What’cha want with Sasuke-teme so long, over there? Bastard didn’t get it, huh?”

Sakura shrugged. “He asked for help.”

“Ha! I knew it! This time, I’m soooo gonna beat him and learn it faster! Believe it!”

“You don’t have a Sharingan, though. That’s going to help him quite a bit.” There was, Sakura admitted if only to herself, probably no better way to motivate Naruto than to point out his disadvantage in a matter. She really wondered what had wired him like that. 

If determination had a visible wavelength, Naruto would be glowing with it right then. 

“I don’t need stupid red eyes to learn this! I’ll do it all by myself!”

Well, this wasn’t really what she’d had in mind when coming over.

“But wouldn’t it be awesome if that memory relay thingy of your shadow clones would work here? I mean, it would still be you doing all the work…Only, more of you?”

Naruto stopped cold, where he was just in the process of focusing his chakra again. 

“Ummmm… I guess? I mean, they could… and then they would… oh, that’s…” His face scrunched up and the whiskered cheeks puffed out nearly comically. He looked a bit like a fluffy, drowned baby fox. Then his expression suddenly cleared in enthusiastic surprise. 

“YES! I got it! You’re the best Sakura-chan!”

Drowned out by the poofs of appearing hordes of Kage Bunshin, Sakura retreated with a quiet “You’re welcome, Naruto.”

She honestly didn’t want to be near the disaster of several hundred-strong troups of shouting, determined Narutos. She kind of doubted that this many of them would really help him but that wasn’t her problem. 

Sasuke on the other side of the lake looked really put out by the waves the splashing and stumbling clones were making.

Sakura walked a bit faster. Not. Her. Problem.

Her problem, it turned out, was sitting in the shade, calmly dozing against Kakashi-sensei’s leg.

There was a weird ringing in her ears for an eternal second before she managed to untwist her clammy hands from where they were tangled in her dress.

Kakashi-sensei closed his book the moment she remembered how her feet worked and gave her one of his eye-smiles. “I thought it was about time you got a real introduction to Uhei.”

The dog in question shook himself out of his doze at that and sat attentively, tail swishing friendly over the ground behind him.

“Nice to meet you again,” he said obligingly.

“N…nice to meet you, too.”

Kakashi-sensei’s gaze lingered on her. No ridiculous quip was forthcoming. 

Sakura rallied herself and offered a close-lipped smile. Uhei’s tail wagged a bit harder.

“Well, now that that’s out of the way we can get to the training part.” 

Hound and human ambled over to her, Uhei switching from Kakashi’s side to crowd around her own legs. Cautiously, Sakura extended a hand and ran the knuckles over his head and down his back. The short fur was warm and smooth and calmed her nearly instantly. 

“This training ground is mostly used for its extensive forest.” Kakashi-sensei gestured behind him where the shadowed depth of Hi no Kuni’s forested wilderness lurked. “You’ll be training with Uhei, today. I prepared a path for you to follow. If you manage to stay on it, you’ll find a small pond that’ll demark the half-way point. You won’t be allowed any breaks.”

There was something missing from Kakashi-sensei’s countenance. It reminded her of the silent appraisal she had endured, after he had woken up in Tazuna’s home. 

“Good luck, Sakura-kun.” 

The silly smile he gave her with his one eye closed didn’t quite fit with the rest of him.

Was this a test?

And if yes, what for?

***

Suffice to say, Sakura did not find the pond. She did manage to get thoroughly lost, though. Uhei, running easily beside her, not bothered at all by brambles, mud and stones, took over navigation at one point until he had her back on the faint trail of shallow footprints and scratched bark that Kakashi-sensei had her follow. 

When she reached the forest edge again, the sun was already setting in reddish hues. Her ankles throbbed and her calves burned from navigating the uneven ground of the forest and her red dress had rips where it had repeatedly snagged on thorns and twigs.

Instead of Kakashi-sensei, a small wrinkly pug wearing headband and vest waited for her. 

“About time you two got back,” was what he said in greeting.

Someone clearly didn’t care for introductions. 

“Well, hello there,” was all Sakura felt she could manage in response. There was no one there to play pretense for so she was glad she didn’t have to bother with social niceties either. Bland was easier when she was exhausted, anyway. 

Uhei, a constant but mostly silent presence at her side, bounded over to the pug. Sakura followed more slowly, wrenching little twigs and assorted debris out of her bound hair. 

“Everyone else left?”, she asked the pug when she flopped down next to Uhei.

“The boss got called away and dismissed the boys,” he said. With boss, she supposed he meant Kakashi-sensei. “You took longer than he expected, so he summoned me to wait for you.”

Bite me, Sakura thought. She offered nothing but a frown at that and, fed up with her hair, ripped the elastic out of her tangled bun. This run through Konohan forests was definitely worse for its continued health than her time in Wave had been.

“She di’ fine. Boss said she’s ne’er di’ tha’ before an’ she foun’ most of the trail by herself.” Uhei’s voice was unconcerned. “She coul’ be faster, though.”

That wasn’t half bad, she decided. Maybe she’d get Uhei a treat for sticking up for her. She did notice the raised brows the pug gave him, though, surprise on his wrinkled little face. 

“If ya say so… Anyway, since Boss’ll be gone for a little while, you’re supposed to meet up with Uhei or one of us at 800 every morning at the bridge near the memorial, you know the one?” 

Sakura nodded once. “Will you be on time?” 

It was a valid question, she thought, because 8am was really cutting it close with the time she had set aside for her new morning runs and strength training. 

She got an affronted bark in response. “We’re always on time, girl.”

They got up to leave, the pug stretching his legs lazily and shaking himself. His pink paws looked really soft. Uhei nudged her side lightly. 

“Your fur’s all long an’ tangled.” He regarded her seriously. “When boss’ fur ge’s like tha’ he shears it with a kunai.”

He eyed her for a second longer and then turned back to the pug. “You said your piece now?”, he asked the greyhound gruffly. Uhei gave a bark and the pug did a weird little shuffle that looked like a shrug. “Okay then, your call… See you, kid.”

He gave a wave with one of his front paws and with a quiet poof they were gone in a cloud of chakra smoke. 

“Shear my fur, huh…” 

Sakura gave a piece of bark knotted in her strands another tug. Her scalp protested angrily. 

“Well then… do it like the dogs do…” A short huff of laughter escaped her at the thought. Or like Kakashi-sensei, she amended, but then again she didn’t want to end up with weird hair like his.

Instead, she gathered her hair in a high ponytail and made short work of cutting it off barely four fingers behind the elastic. 

In her fist, the cut pink strands, bark, twigs and all, looked oddly dead. “Okay Sakura, the nuisance is gone now.” Her voice warbled a little. 

The nuisance was gone. The hair fell unceremoniously to the ground, the slight breeze spreading it over the grass. 

***

* * *


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We get a second-hand impression of Sakura's training. Sakura, herself, feels generally beat and gets several surprises, some more unwanted than others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are several things I want to say before we start.
> 
> 1) This chapter put in an amazing amount of last minute resistance, considering that the first draft is several months old. I debated very long, whether I want to introduce another perspective this soon. Your general love of Kakashi's dogs gave me an option I hadn't considered before. So, thank you!
> 
> 2) My work schedule changed; my kids' schedules changed; generally all our RL schedules are a mess of epic proportions. I don't know how it happened. 
> 
> I will, therefore, very likely either skip my next intended update in 14 days entirely, or at least postpone by one week!
> 
> I'm hoping to be back on the 14-days schedule by Christmas.
> 
> Thanks for your attention... *bows demurely*

* * *

**Cicadas** shrieked loudly through the evening air when Uhei trotted up the old and rarely used path to their homestead. 

Pakkun watched through wavering heat rising up from the humid ground, as his slim pack mate drew closer. The rice fields on either side of the road were waiting for the threatening summer rains; the ones closer to the village and along another tangent of the small road were well kept and green. The fields on Uhei’s path, on the other hand, consisted mainly of yellowish stalks and drying mud.

It had been a long several years since the Hatake Clan was numerous enough that someone had cared for their fields.

Uhei bounded up over the barely standing fence, and Pakkun slowly and lethargically stood from his perch in the shade of the engawa. 

“You’re late,” he grumbled but made space for the greyhound to reach the small well of flowing water that had always served as drinking spot for the Hatake Hounds, whether they were bound by contract, blood or stayed wild. 

Uhei snorted between mouthfuls of water but he didn’t answer until he had drunk his fill. It was hot enough that even he grudgingly panted with his tongue lolling out – Uhei was still conscious about the missing tip of his tongue. 

Pakkun had chewed Urushi out after hearing how he had ribbed little Uhei about the injury that was the result of a training accident, but the damage had already been done and Uhei did his best to keep the perceived flaw hidden.

No wonder the Boss didn’t usually summon Urushi and Uhei at the same time, no matter that they were both trained to be the go between with his wolfhounds. There was no love lost there. 

“Did the girl take that long for the training course?” 

Uhei’s newly acquired ‘puppy’ was still a source of endless amusement for Pakkun. Ribbing him about it brought the best reactions from his serious and uptight pack mate. 

Predictably, Uhei shuffled back defensively and narrowed his eyes.

“Her name’s Sakura. No’ girl. An’ she was finished before lunch, already. Bu’ she wasn’ sa’isfied wi’ her chakra enhancemen’. So we did it again on a differen’ course.”

As funny as it was to see Uhei’s hackles rise, there was a slight sinking sensation that settled in Pakkun’s stomach. This was the third day of Uhei training Sakura without the boss and also the third time that the slip of a girl finished too fast. 

“Which course did you do?,” he scoffed, “the woodland trail on Ground 14?” That, at least, would be in accordance with the skills of a beginner. 

Uhei scowled right back. “Tha’s too easy. We did nature and scen’ trails this morning in grassland.”

Well, wasn’t this just the thing to happen when the boss was away. Pakkun shook his fur and tried for nonchalance with an extended scratch behind his left ear. The only way up in difficulty to the grassland course was the one in the swamp. And they really couldn’t just bring a green Genin to that Training Ground. Even the boss himself probably wasn’t really free to do that. 

“Aren’t you the proud father there…”

“She’s no’ my puppy!” 

***

  
“Huh. You’re back early!” 

Pakkun regarded his pack mate, laying in the shade next to the old compound house. There was a bag of small, bunny-shaped dog treats between his paws and Uhei was busy chewing. 

“Un. I’ve been here since…,” he squinted at the sun that peeked between the leaves of the old acorn tree, “about a sprin’ distance aroun’ our lands.”

No longer than two hours then. Pakkun silently lamented the continued disability of his pack mates to tell the time in human means. 

“Tought her stalking, today,” he went on proudly. 

“And you keep telling me, she’s not your pup… You even teach her of your own accord!”, Pakkun needled while trying to swipe one of the delicious smelling treats. 

“Paws off,” the greyhound growled and tugged the bag closer.

Pakkun huffed but relented. There was definitely a lot to tell the boss when he came back tomorrow. Uhei was really invested in ‘having an eye’ on Sakura-san’s training as Kakashi-boss had requested. He should probably keep an eye on that unexpected dynamic; already a bit of an outlier in the pack due to Urushi, Uhei taking treats and then not sharing with him as the leader… 

“You really like her, don’t you?”

Uhei rolled on his side, unimpressed. 

“She listens. An’ she learns. Wha’s no’ to like there?” 

Pakkun let the topic go. The boss had to decide how to deal with the mess he had created here. The girl was his Genin; to drop her on Uhei, hunting dog through and through, had been a gamble in the best of scenarios. 

This was just an added complication.

  
***

Sakura ached.

Kakashi-sensei, she thought blearily, had really gone overboard.

Their C-rank delivery run to Otafuki Gai the day before had taken a nasty turn when they had been chased by a flock of geese; embarrassingly, they all still had the beak marks to show for it. 

Her fingers ached from the Senbon handling Kakashi-sensei had decided to punish her with today. She had no idea what she had done to deserve it. She’d have rather played ‘Stalker’ again with Uhei but she hadn’t seen the dog for more than a week.

Sasuke and Naruto, in contrast, had been allowed to play ninja tag in the forest with ink seals. They’d looked like they’d played canvass for a body painter, afterwards. 

Even her chakra ached from following Kakashi-sensei’s off-handed challenge of asking her to change her natural chakra frequency. It would refine her control, he had promised. She still held out on judging that morsel of absentmindedly given learning motivation. 

So, when she trudged home that night, stars already twinkling brightly overhead, and finally, shakily, managed to pry the front door open, she was not prepared to find two figures sitting at the kitchen table, cups of steaming tea in front of them and frowns drawn on their faces.

“Are you supposed to be here?”, she heard herself say before her brain caught up with her.

“Hello to you, too”, her father, Kizashi, answered cheerily, the worried lines around his mouth softening. 

She clumsily toed off her sandals, not trusting her hands to hold up to the strain of pulling them off.

“Also, the poison is out of my system. I’m allowed to sleep at home under the condition that I return every morning for more treatment…,” he raised a pink eyebrow, “And please don’t be rude, darling. Say hello to your uncle.”

“Hello Koji-ojisan,” Sakura repeated durifully. She wasn’t particularly thrilled to see uncle Koji. 

The man was several years younger than her mother, his sister, and had the unfortunate tendency to drop in unannounced at the oddest hours, sometimes in the middle of the night, crashing on the couch. His visits usually left her dad looking worried and on the rare occasion that he and her mum happened to run into each other, there’d always be terse words and drawn shoulders. Her mum was withdrawn for days after every one of these visits.

To make matters worse, he was the only one who had not been mollified when Sakura’s grades had dropped in the physical classes and her pretend obsession with girly things started. He’d been poking at her since, whenever their paths crossed. 

“Hello Sakura. Nice haircut, looks practical.” His voice was as annoyingly amicable as ever. 

Sakura swayed through the darkened living room, catching the kitchen towel her father threw at her face in mock outrage over her bad manners, and fell into the third chair.

“I’m soooo tired…”

She hid her face in her arms for good measure. Just incase her dad hadn’t understood her predicament yet.

Porcelain clattered too loud onto the wooden table before her. The scent of her mother’s favorite herbal tea drifted under the tent of her arms.

“Tea, dad? What happened to the curry?”

“The… curry?”

“You had take-out curry for dinner. Is there anything left?” She had smelled the spices the moment she had come in. Uhei’s – or maybe Kakashi-sensei’s, she wasn’t sure - games of ‘what does this smell like’ the week before was bearing fruits, it seemed. Even if her nose had felt mostly clogged after each session. 

She lifted her head just in time to catch her dad’s sheepish expression. 

“Ah… so sorry, blossom, there aren’t any leftovers…”

That figured, she thought and gave uncle Koji a baleful look. Making her dad worry and eating all the curry. 

“So sorry, Sakura-chan,” her uncle tried. The sincerity in his voice left much to be desired, though. Instead, he rummaged through one of the pockets on his half-open flak jacket. “Here, catch!”

She caught the ration bar before it could smack into her forehead. Take-out curry against a ration bar and uncle Koji’s presence. What a bad trade off. 

“I’ll make a huge breakfast tomorrow, okay blossom?” Her father extended an arm to ruffle her hair but aborted the movement with a grimace. 

Sakura straightened. “Is it supposed to be like this? I thought the medics said your arm is healed?”

At least that was what her mum had said when she’d last asked her. 

“It’s okay, blossom. There are just some late reactions to the neurotoxin. It’s why I’m at the hospital every morning, so we get this taken care of.”

His grin didn’t really hide the tightened corners of his eyes nor his hunched shoulders. He was clearly worried. Her dad was really bad at lying, Sakura realized suddenly. What a weird thing to notice. She was better at it than he was.

She let herself relax and smiled slightly, face smooth.

“Oh, okay then. Does it hurt a lot?”

She extended her arms to him slowly, as if to take his hand and inspect it.

“It’s mostly just when I’m moving too fast. Don’t worry over your old man, daughter of mine!”

His smile was slightly more natural at this, but Sakura didn’t miss the way he drew his hands back from her. Both of them.

“You’re not old”, she protested, as she always did. 

“Oooohh, but I’m feeling my age, blossom. Maybe you shouldn’t make an old man like me stay up so late, waiting for his beautiful daughter…” He shook his head in played-up dismay and his dark pink hair flopped around ridiculously. 

“Then this old man should probably turn in now”, uncle Koji said drily and made a shooing motion with his hands. “Chop chop, off you go, Kizashi-jii…”

Her dad rolled his eyes but obligingly made his way out of the kitchen.

“Please don’t traumatize my little blossom too much, Koji.”

The playful admonishment had a kernel of real warning somewhere in it. 

Sakura listened until his steps on the floor above faded and let go of the gullible little daughter front, she had put on for her dad. A snort drew her thoughts from contemplating the real extent of her father’s injuries. 

“Kizashi’s never been a good liar.”

Koji-ojisan was slouched over his side of the table, chin on fist, dark blond hair hanging messily where it wasn’t stuffed behind his hitai-ate. His eyes were fastened on her, curious. 

“I… yeah. I noticed.” 

“Mhm. I’m sure you did.”

His gaze didn’t leave her face. It was unnerving and Sakura abruptly realized that she couldn’t remember ever being completely alone with Koji-ojisan before. 

“Nice acting, by the way,” he added offhandedly. 

Sakura swallowed a sour retort. There was a reason she didn’t like him other than her parents’ worry whenever he showed up. And it definitely had to do with the subversive poking he did whenever he saw her. It had been so hard, in the beginning, to not react to his jabs. 

Instead, she just rolled her eyes, more of a concession to him than she had ever allowed herself since designing her academy act.

“Did he tell you what’s wrong?”

“What did you notice?” 

There was a challenge buried in his words that Sakura couldn’t help but want to rise to. And by now, was no reason to hold back. Even if it would definitely validate uncle Koji and his annoying persistence when it came to herself. 

“Both of his hands are shaking, and they can barely carry any weight.”

The teacup had been a worrying indicator.

“He can’t straighten his right arm, maybe something with the tendons? And he avoided my touch. The nerves then?” She frowned at the teacup in her hands. “He’s in pain and worried about the treatment.”

Koji hummed approvingly. “There you have it then.”

“What, that’s it? You don’t know more?”

“He’s worried about treatment success. Hasn’t said it in so many words, though. There’s an old Suna neurotoxin from the Second War that the symptoms look like. Easy to treat if caught immediately. If it’s allowed to settle? Not so much.” He shrugged lightly. “He has your mother fooled, by the way.”

If it was allowed to settle in, then what? What happened then?

Silence descended over the small kitchen and Sakura unenthusiastically chewed on the mealy ration bar. Her dad had said that he’d be fine after the treatment. Medicine had come far since the Second War. Maybe he was afraid of the treatment itself. Sakura would probably be.

Urgh.. there was no use in getting upset about it now. Maybe it would really be just fine. She’d have to keep an eye on the situation.

Sakura washed down the last of her disgusting dinner with lukewarm tea, when another question rose in her mind. One she actually hadn’t ever allowed herself to contemplate in depth before. 

But there was a ninja sitting at her table that was neither a Genin nor her closed-off sensei and he seemed willing to talk.

She didn’t want to stay a Genin forever. She could do much better but for that she needed to start scoping out options. 

“Ne, Koji-jisan, you’re a Tokujou, aren’t you?” 

His trademark mellow smile was on his lips when he nodded. “Need career counselling already? Aren’t you too green for that?” 

“I just want to find out about specializations for later,” she offered.

“Later, huh? Do you have a sensei?”

As if her father hadn’t bragged about his daughter being assigned to the Jounin-track already. 

“I started learning how to track recently. I just want to know what else there is. So, what do you specialize in?” 

He’d never carried any equipment with him in all the years she’d known him that gave her any clue.

Some expression flitted across his face, not amusement but something darker. Sakura wasn’t sure, it was gone too fast.

“I’m pretty solid with Taijutsu and knifes. Best with the Tanto, though don’t give me sword or I’ll stab myself,” a grin lifted the edges of his lips but something told her that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with her asking him. 

“Other than that, I specialize in having a superbly winning personality and rakishly good looks.” He shrugged, gaze straying off her for a second.

Something settled weirdly in her stomach. Her mind ran through possibilities, but the options she came up with for that answer were limited.

“It’s just, you’re mostly out of the village, right? I was just wondering…” She trailed of probingly.

A bark of soft laughter rang out. “You’re good at putting things together, aren’t you, Sakura-chan? I’m sure you’ll get this.”

He finished with his tea and made his way to the genkan. 

Not staying the night, then.

When he had pulled on his shoes he stood and regarded her through the dark of the living room and something conflicted crossed his expression. “I live in the Tokushima district. Big yellow apartment block facing Ueno Koen. Feel free to swing by. If you can find out the rare times when I’m in the village.” 

In the yellow cast of the genkan's single overhead light bulb, he appeared much older than she knew he was. 

“Jaa ne, Sakura-chan.”

He slipped out of the door without a sound.

Well. That was definitely a less grating visit than usual from him. The underlying disappointment whenever he looked at her hadn’t been there, either. 

***

  
The next morning brought a surprise.

Sakura had just started in on her strength training in one of the communal training grounds when a Kakashi-sensei shaped person dropped down next to her.

She flexed her chakra sharply.

“Kai!”

The apparition didn’t vanish and stayed Kakashi-shaped. She frowned at it. 

There was no way this was real.

“Kai!” 

“… I am personally insulted right now, Sakura-chan”, the apparition drawled and okay, Sakura had to admit that the flat voice did sound like her teacher.

“You’re … early.”

“I feel like there was a question somewhere in that statement.” 

She stared at him. There was nothing she could read apart from a mock hurt front and amusement. Annoyed, she blew a strand of escaped hair off her sweaty face. 

“Yes, you’re sensei, alright”, she huffed.

“What gave it away?”

That question deserved nothing but a glare as response, in her opinion. A smile crinkled his visible eye at that. 

“Anyway, now that you know I’m me, and I know you’re you, I can tell you that I have put you down for a mission.”

“Just me? Without Sasuke and Naruto?”

“Aa, just you. The boys will get their own entertainment, but I stumbled across a perfect learning opportunity for you.”

Kakashi-sensei sounded a bit too upbeat about it for Sakura to be sure about his intention but there really wasn’t anything she could do about that. Or maybe that was just because she continuously felt like she was missing something with him when he was like that.

“What’s it about then?”

“There was a last-minute spot on a Search and Rescue squad. It‘s C-ranked and Chuunin-led. They leave in an hour from the south gate.”

“In an hour? How long? And where to? And why didn’t you find me earlier?! I need to pack!” Sakura abandoned her half-finished crunches and started speed-walking towards the village.

“And why am I doing Search and Rescue in the first place?” 

Kakashi-sensei side-eyed her. His long strides kept him easily by her side. 

“Plan for a week. I don’t know where; south probably, considering your exit gate”, he counted down her questions on his fingers, voice droll. “Hummm… I only found out about the mission twenty minutes ago… and…ah. As for why; you’re the backup tracker since the lead is also doubling as field medic and team leader. Was that everything?”

“No!”

Of course, that wasn’t everything! Who were her teammates and what was the team structure and – 

She bit down on the flare of unreasonable panic at the thought of doing a mission without her own team. That kind of wasn’t the main problem.

“Ah. There’s more?”

“Yes! I can’t track yet! I just started! Why am I slated as a tracker?”

Did he want to embarrass her? There was no way that a few short weeks of training qualified her for this.

His amused huff stopped Sakura stopped short.

“What. What’s so funny?”

“You’re an annoyingly fast learner. Uhei was so proud he had to come up with something new those last two days last week.” 

And there Kakashi-sensei went again with the weird compliments. And if those five days of training were enough to count as a tracker, she'd never again complain about Kakashi/sensei being late. Shouln't he have continued with her training then, after being back from his own mission? Instead, he'd had her doing... 

Oh. 

“Then what was the internal chakra manipulation for? It’s not really meant to be for control, is it?” 

That would probably be too easy, all things considered.

Kakashi-sensei shrugged, visible eyebrow raised. 

“Mah, Sakura-chan, maybe I simply ran out of ideas on what to occupy you with. And it really does refine chakra control, too. I suppose experience will give you better … insights.”

For half a second, Sakura mournfully thought back to Iruka-sensei and his clear-cut instructions. 

“Who’s the team leader? Do I know them?”, she asked instead and banished the thought with memories of unending boredom, also of Iruka-sensei. 

“You might. Ever heard about Inuzuka Hana? As far as I know, her brother should be about your age.”

“Oh. Yes, Kiba mentioned her.” Well, more like complained about her but with Kiba that was nothing out of the ordinary. Considering the things he bemoaned about his mean old sister, she sounded like a very sensible person.

“There you go then.” He glanced at the sun, barely up in the hazy sky. It was just gone seven and the creeping humidity already promised to make the day unbearable. Summer in Konoha was nothing to scoff at. 

“You’ll do well, Sakura. Don’t worry.”

And then he was gone, flitting across the roofs faster than Sakura could follow.

When she finally arrived at home, she only had half an hour left until the mission was supposed to depart. Hastily, she grabbed the last few packets of kunai and shuriken, making a note to restock upon return, and stuffed two dozen ration bars on top. Hopefully, she wouldn’t need that many, disgusting as they were.

The summer bedroll followed.

Her wardrobe had her stumped, though. Three of her four red quipaos were either torn, waiting for needle and thread, in need of washing, or unsalvageable stained. The last was clinging, sweat-soaked, to her body.  
  
That didn’t look good. 

Feeling the minutes slip by as an itch on her back, she hastily stuffed an old dark long-sleeve and leggings combo into the pack. It would do.

She dithered a bit in the kitchen, wondering how to inform her parents of the last-minute mission but decided that a short note would have to suffice. 

Gone for a week, Search and Rescue. Don’t worry. Love, Sakura.

She looked it over critically, added the date as an afterthought and pinned it to the fridge with an obnoxiously pink magnet.

When she arrived at the south gate, there were several teams milling about, all of them Chunin, all of them clearly preparing to leave. She didn’t see anyone who looked like she could be Kiba’s sister.

Nervousness swept hot over her skin. How unprofessional if she couldn’t even find her designated team.

“Are you the last-minute stand in, then?”

The voice came from her back and Sakura spun around. A chunin stood behind her, a good head taller that her. His wild black hair spilled over his hitae-ate in long spikes and the handles of some kind of metal weapon peaked over each of his shoulders. 

The bandage across his nose crinkled with the smile on his face.

“I…suppose so. At least if you’re Inuzuka Hana’s team?”

“Oi, Izumo, you hear that? ‘Hana’s team’, she says!” He shouted over to a gaggle of other Chunin, all of them years older that her. One of them extricated himself from the gossiping group and came over.

“Well, as long as we’re at the tracking part, that holds up, Tetsu. If there’s a fighting part to it then you’re mine.” There was an easy smile on his face as he adjusted the bandanna covering his hair. 

“Oooohhh, I’m yours anyway, Izu-darling, don’tcha worry!”, the one who had found her first simpered at his comrade.

Sakura stifled a grin at the ribbing. That sounded like a much more mellow kind of relationship than the one between Naruto and Sasuke-kun. 

“Kamizuki Izumo’s the name. This goof here is Hagane Kotetsu. You’re our stand-in then?” Despite the hair that was obscuring the better part of the right side of his face, Izumo didn’t give the impression of skimping on the emotional expressions. 

Sakura immediately decided that she liked him. He projected a kind of openness that was very genuine in the way it was so casually displayed. 

“Haruno Sakura, Genin”, she introduced herself, ”Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Genin, huh. That’s a rare one.” Izumo gave her once-over at that.

“Rare specialization, tracking”, Kotetsu explained, “more so under the rank of chunin. Most find it boring; no fighting and such. Don’t think I ever heard of any, apart from the obvious constellations with Aburame, Inuzuka and Hyuuga.”   
  
“I’m not a Hyuuga. Or any of the others.”

Izumo laughed. “You don’t look like it, either.”

“Yeah, you’re not stuck-up enough for a Hyuuga and you’re missing the shades for an Aburame-“

“-and if you were a bastard Inuzuka I’d have heard of you before”, said a new voice, drily.

The older girl it belonged to was tall, taller than her male mission partners, but she still looked dwarfed next to the three humongous ninken that crowded around her. They went up nearly to Sakura’s collarbone.

“Haruno Sakura, right?” She scrutinized her from head to toes, gaze lagging on her bright pink hair and the frayed white hems of her red dress. Sakura wished she’d taken the time to change out of it.

“Hai.”

“Well then. You came recommended from Sage knows where. Didn’t think we’d get a secondary tracker on such short notice, but then there you are, popping out of the woodwork.”

Again, her gaze was weighing.

Sakura didn’t quite know if she was required to answer this. There was no question involved.

Hana rolled her eyes at her silence and shrugged.

“Anyway. The paperwork’s handed in; let’s move out.” They fastened their packs and cleared the thinning crowd of Chunin teams in front of the gate.

“Good hunting, girl”, she said, when they left the cobble stone path where it swerved to the left in a lazy curve and took to the trees to kept straight south instead. 

“Good hunting”, Sakura muttered warily at her back when she passed to the front of the group, Sakura herself staying third in row before Kotetsu.

Such a prickly team-leader. 

  
  


* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To reassure you:  
> I, personally, don't like it when an OC hijacks the story. So, you obviously don't need to fear that either. He's, like a lot of things in this story, either a plot device or part of a setup. Or both... or maybe a red herring...or possibly all of the above...? In any case, he's my very own non-canon addition to Sakura's family. Please take care of him!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura gets a lesson about the definition of mission success. And even though it's all rather tame, she's not sure if she likes it...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, I'm back...
> 
> I am sure that this chapter won't satisfy some of your bamf! cravings that I felt from the comments. This is slow!bamf if barely 25000 words in even counts as slow. We'll get there.
> 
> There's a lesson for me there as well. I keep feeling like I should rewrite the chapter to fulfill your every need (and mine, let's be honest:)). I'm learning to keep to my storyline, because otherwise it will likely derail everything else. Been there, done the permanent hiatus gig. 
> 
> Also, I don't like posting on fridays; everyone and their aunt posts on fridays and the weekend... but whatever, it's an update and this is the only day this month that was a viable option.

* * *

  
**They** ran the whole day with barely any stops.

It was well into the twilight hours when Hana decided that neither of her team members had good enough eyes to continue travelling without risking serious injuries. Sakura had the feeling that if it had been up to the Inuzuka she’d have them run through the whole night.

Kotetsu simply rolled his eyes when Hana grudgingly announced that they’d put up camp. “It’s not like she doesn’t know, we can’t see in the dark”, he whispered to Sakura when they left to collect firewood, “She’s still annoyed by it every time, though.”

“Do you run missions together often then?”

“Not regulary, no. But if there is a tracking one or a search and rescue that doesn’t go straight to ANBU then it mostly falls to us.”

“Didn’t you say that Aburame and Hyuuga track as well?”

“Aburame, yes. But you won’t find a lot of them with the regular forces. So, there’s a general lack of them openly available. Also, they do chakra tracking. Different application. The Hyuuga on the other hand…” He trailed off and shrugged. “They could be great trackers. If they’d get that stick out of… ah. Well. Sorry. The bulk of them are frontliners what with their Taijjutsu and all. You’ll also find Hyuuga at the hospital but they rarely track. A shame, really.”

“There was a Hyuuga in my class”, Sakura offered, “she liked medicine, but I think her clan wants her as a fighter. She’s in a… well, a tracking squad, I guess? With an Aburame and an Inuzuka.”

Kotetsu laughed. “Then somebody had the balls to stick it to the Hyuuga elders. They really don’t like the Inuzuka.”

Neat, she had learned more about clan specialization in one conversation with a chuunin than she had done during her entire stint with the clan heirs at the Academy. 

“So, tracking is mostly an Inuzuka thing?”

“Yes, general tracking and hunting is their thing. Well, apart from fighting. Can’t forget that. Aggressive bunch, the lot of them…”

When they had the fire started, Hana and her dogs returned with a young deer. There was some scrambling until everyone had enough meat on each of their sticks and then the they waited, while Hana’s monster dogs made short work of most of the leftover carcass. 

“You set a perimeter, Izumo?”

“All finished, Hana. If your dogs would…” 

“Un. I’ll send them later.”

For a while it was silent except for the meat sizzling over the fire and the occasional snarl from the dogs shredding their kill.

Sakura very carefully steered her thoughts away from how pieces of that had clung between Uhei’s teeth after the fight at Wave and instead remembered the quiet five days of training with the calm, serious greyhound. 

She really did miss him.

“So…I know that you already got your mission briefing but would anyone mind filling me in, please?” 

Hana looked up from nibbling at her mostly raw meat.

“Huh. Right you are.” She put her stick back on the fire and sat up. “It’s hurricane season. They’re mostly only a problem for Noodle, Tea and southern Fire Country at the coast but a few days ago a particularly strong one crossed the whole peninsula close to Tea. It demolished large swathes of forest south of the capital. The port villages were prepared for the biggest part but they’re missing sixteen men out for lumber that should have been on the way home when the hurricane hit.”

She drew a crude map into the dust and marked an area in the hilly parts south of Keishi, the Fire Capital. “They’re felling iron wood around here, transport it to the river and then raft it downstream until they hit the coast. The headman of Ikanomura said, they found neither lumber nor men downstream and fear that they are cut off in their valley or injured.”

That sounded straight forward at least. 

Izumo took the time to update her on their preferred search patterns – not that Sakura had a lot of knowledge about any kind of search patterns in general, but she thought she probably faked it semi-convincingly. 

When they finally decided to retire, Hana gave Izumo a small nod. “I’ll have my partners support your perimeter, Izumo. Where do you want them?”

“Have one of them circle, you know the drill. They’ll hear the whistle, I set it on their frequency. I only set up the standard circular barrier without an anchor, since there’s not much out here.”

“So, no watch for us?”, Sakura asked lowly.

“Naahh, this is a low danger mission. And we’re really close to the capital. The circular barrier is more than enough.” Kotetsu slipped quietly into his bedroll. 

“Oi, Ichi. You’re up for patrol!” Hana’s voice bellowed across the camp. One of the large dogs got up and trotted over. “Ni is second and San is third!”

Sakura barely managed to catch her snort with her blanket. 

“Did she really call her monster dogs Ichi, Ni and San?!” 

“Oh boy, you bet she did”, Kotetsu whispered back, a grin in his voice.

“You do know that I can hear you, right?” Hana’s growl drifted over to them.

Sakura buried her laughter in her pillow.

***

  
The night brought rain and it persisted all throughout the morning hours. It was a bedraggled group of drenched ninja and dogs that finally stopped at the upper ledge of a steep hillside at the foot of which two moderately sized streams combined into one decent river. 

It demarked the northern edges of the lumber crews’ preferred area for work. The farther south they had come the clearer the signs of natural disaster had become; the occasional windswept hillside had given way to broken branches and finally to uprooted and splintered trees. 

The swirling waters of the gushing river below them were muddy brown and pieces of wooden debris were carried downstream at a fast pace. 

“This is where we begin our sweeps. According to the maps and our information, they kept to the east of the river.”

Hana had shown them the maps before they broke camp that morning and Sakura was aware, that the area they had to cover stretched three kilometer out from the river through hilly, partially steep terrain. 

“Keep to your assigned corridor, standard zigzagging search, you know the drill. Signal if you find something.”

They dispersed, Kotetsu taking his place closest to the river with Hana covering the corridor next to him. Izumo accompanied Sakura for the first two and something kilometer until he broke off with a small salute and a “See you later.”

It was a bit off-putting, being all by herself like this. With Uhei, at least, there had been the knowledge that she had someone at her back. Izumo’s steps had long faded and been replaced by the creaking of wood and her own breath. Falling into a light jog she followed the invisible layout her search pattern demanded. 

With team seven, she was never alone.

Sakura easily started cataloguing the sights like Kakashi-sensei’s underhanded training had taught her, olfactory center slightly chakra enhanced to add another dimension. 

There was a steep drop off the hillside to her right that acted as a natural border to her search area since scaling it without chakra, and while lugging trees at that, was rather impossible. And indeed, by the time the artificial chakra flare signal came from further east, Sakura had found few signs of humans passing; she had followed the one human made trail that had ended in the middle of her corridor and was just crossing over into Izumo’s assigned area when the search was called off.   
  
Signs of life became more obvious the further she followed the trail in direction of the flare. It smelled like human; and blood. Halfway to the rally point she caught up with Izumo.  
When they finally reached a small clearing, Kotetsu and Hana were already hard at work.

They caught the tail end of an argument that looked rather one-sided and ended with Hana bodily dragging a tall, broad man away from Kotetsu’s slowly rising makeshift shelter and over to her improvised medical station. Mint green chakra flickered to live between Hana’s hands and slowly the open gash on the burly man’s arm lost some of its sickly yellowish appearance. 

The man winced when she poked at the open wound. Feverish sweat was still beading on his brow. 

“I cleaned out the infection but I’m not gonna heal it all up, Yoshi-san”, she said brusquely, tying a bandage neatly over it. “I still have a shattered kneecap and an unknown head injury to do.” Not to speak of the assortment of broken legs, twisted ankles and torn ligaments Sakura had noticed quite a few of the men sported.

“Tha’s fine, lass… erm… kunoichi-san.” He was clearly cowed from the dress down Hana must have given him.

“Hey, Sakura, Izumo”, Hana gave them a distracted nod while she waved the next man over, “you have perfect timing. There are two men still missing, according to Yoshi-san.”

She curtly swiped disinfectant down a deep wound on the head of the man that had sat on the makeshift stretcher. “Oh, don’t be a baby”, she muttered when he flinched back.

“There was a landslide further south that caught half of the crew that was down there. They were only sure they were missing two, when Kotetsu and I turned up with the last stragglers.” She pointed to four heavily injured men laying on cots under a tarp doubling as medical tent. 

“They didn’t have much luck searching for their men, disorganized and injured as most are. Yoshi-san thinks, the missing two were caught by the mud and debris.”

That wasn’t a particularly promising setup. 

Sakura tried not to frown. “It’s been three days already…”

“Not quite. The landslide happened after the storm was over. But it’s still…” 

Sakura shifted, uneasy about the prospect. They shouldn’t lose any more time in this case. Hana, predictably, caught her movement and nodded to her.

“This is your show now, Sakura. Though just to warn you, there likely won’t be many signs left if they did get caught by the debris. It’s not ideal but…” She frowned a bit at her hands and then seemed to come to a conclusion.

“Izumo, I’m gonna give you both San. Scents will be hard to find with all this rain, though, even for Inuzuka dogs. San, be nice.”

The large dog huffed in something like affront and bounded over to the Chuunin. 

“Wait a second, Sakura.”

She stopped from turning to go after Izumo, who weaved through the sodden men to where Kotetsu was setting up temporary shelter with those still able bodied.

Despite the muggy heat, her fingers felt clammy. Hana seemed fine with her performance so far but then again, Sakura hadn’t been solely responsible for the tracking part of the operation up until now. Really, she hadn’t even been particularly useful so far. But that was probably where the ‘backup’ part of her assignment started now. 

“Yes?”

“This is gonna be a tough one, Sakura. You’re good at pretending and you learn fast, but I know that you haven’t done many of these missions before.” Hana smiled awkwardly. “Don’t worry, it’s not obvious. Kotetsu and Izumo didn’t notice. They’re not trackers, themselves.”

Sakura wasn’t about to point out to Hana that this was her very first mission of this kind, period.

“How did you know?”, she asked instead. 

“Nothing terrible, kid”, she laughed lightly, “Just a few standard search patterns that most trackers are familiar with after the first year or so. And you’re a bit too nervous to be wholly comfortable with your role yet.”

Oh. That wasn’t bad then. 

Hana abruptly got serious again. “Anyway, what I wanted to say is, it’s not your fault if you can’t find them.” 

Sakura’s thoughts came to an unintended stop. She opened her mouth, unsure what to even say to that when Hana hurriedly interrupted her.

“I know, I know, that’s just about the first lesson you get when you start specializing and you probably heard it a thousand times already but I’m serious, Sakura. In these conditions the chance to find the men is slim. Successful recovery is even less likely. We’re lucky we found thirteen of them mostly healthy.”

She huffed noisily and scratched at the mud caking the clan markings on her cheek, clearly uncomfortable. 

“In any case, you get until midday tomorrow and then I want both of you back here. With or without your targets. You get me?”

“Hai, Hana-san.”

The Inuzuka nodded once and went to join the lumbermen in sorting out their injuries.

Sakura quietly flitted between burly limbs and caught up with Izumo, mind turning in circles. 

“You ready to go?”

She felt weird, setting out with failure already a likely outcome. She shrugged. “Sure. Let’s go.”

They followed the general direction Yoshi had given them. It was slow going, having to take the ground route since large swathes of trees had been broken like wooden chopsticks and the rest looked ready to topple with the next gust of wind.

It was already late afternoon when they reached a part of the woods where the destruction was complete. A path, broader than the Naka river, had been cut through the forest, mud and stones left in its wake and large iron trees, splintered like flimsy toothpicks, littered the edges. 

She saw Izumo’s mouth turn down. He noticed her glance and gave a small grimace. 

“Let’s try our best then.”

They followed the destruction halfway down the valley, where the original camp had once stood. They were faster now, too. 

There was precious little left of the camp. The tents were mostly smashed, assorted camping ware littered the ground where the storm couldn’t reach to scatter it. 

Silently, they got to work.

They easily found the path, most of the men had used to flee the threatening catastrophe; they’d left a clear track like only a panicked stampede could. Almost all manmade tracks converged in it. 

Then, San bounded up to her and pulled at her sleeve. 

“Okay, okay. I’ll follow you.”

When Izumo caught up to them sometime later, Sakura had caught on to the scent track San had found. It was already nearly dissipated to her chakra-enhanced senses, but it looked like San could still easily follow it.

At least, until he led them out of the left-over trees and into the middle of the landslide’s path of destruction. The soaked earth felt unstable under her feet and behind her, a collection of several trees and a few boulders started to slip slide in the wake of her and Izumo’s footsteps. 

San whined apologetically, turning in a circle on the desolate mud. 

Sakura forced more chakra into her nose. Her sinuses burned in warning. 

No, there was no more scent left. San huffed sadly next to her but resolutely did not get up from his spot. Sakura couldn’t help but think that Uhei would have been more helpful - even if he’d probably be bored seeing as their quarry wasn’t trying to evade or kill them.

Slowly, she trickled another stream of chakra to her nose. 

“Ouch.” Sneezing, she lost control and the chakra dispersed again. 

“You alright, there?” Izumo shot her a concerned look. 

“It’s fine, I’m just thinking…”

“No more scent then, huh? I was already surprised you found something in the first place.” He looked dismayed at the dark sky above them. “It’s no wonder. These are some of the worst conditions for tracking.”

Just then rain started dribbling again, sliding down coolly against the sweaty skin of her neck and into her already soaked dress. 

“Give me another minute, please, Izumo-san”, Sakura muttered, mind grasping for a fleeting idea. No visuals, no scent, nothing to hear… but if they were still alive then they’d have a chakra signal. 

One with a different frequency and phase than her own. Could she use a kind of interference detection for finding them? That was likely the reason Kakashi-sensei had her doing the chakra frequency manipulation thing, right? He had even admitted that she might find it useful for tracking or sensing. 

“Do you mind if I try something?” 

Her question only drew a raised brow. “Not at all. Feel free. But I’d suggest that if we don’t find anything in the next thirty minutes then we turn back for stable ground and set up camp. It’s getting too dark to cross over here safely.”

“I won’t need that long, if it works…”

She couldn’t spread out her chakra in a broad wave, though. Maybe Naruto could but Sakura didn’t have that kind of chakra to spare. She loosely held the ram sign to help her with moving her chakra around. If she compressed it and pushed it out in a flat, circular shape all around… That could work. 

With that curious twist that made her coils ache in training, she stilled her chakra and assigned it a set phase. Standing wave, Kakashi-sensei had called it, but Sakura thought it felt more like trying to hold down the ends of a living, squirming bundle of ropes and get them to move in synch. 

The feedback from pulsing out her ordered chakra made her ears pop and an instant headache bloomed behind her eyes. So, this was why most Jutsu were disconnected after casting them. And probably why high level Genjutsu users were so rare what with most techniques above C-rank establishing a feedback loop to the victims. They probably all suffered from chronic migraines. 

It took her another try to manage to filter out the static noise that object distortions caused. 

The third gave her a nosebleed and something like results. 

There was a blip. A periodic warble, weakly impinging on the abstract amalgamation of nerves, pathways and active tenketsu that made up a ninja’s chakra sense. 

“Let’s try it this way, Izumo-san.”

She pointed further to her right, where the destruction of the mud avalanche petered off into the left-over stumps from the hurricane.

“Do I want to know why you look like you took a right hook to the nose?”

Sakura forced herself to blink through the white spots in her vision. She spit out the blood that collected at the back of her tongue, but the metallic taste clung.

“I … uhh.. Have a feeling.” Her lips felt slightly numb.

“A… feeling. About what, exactly?”

Instead of answering, she stood from her crouch and slowly took a sip from her canteen. 

“Sakura. I need a bit more than that.” Izumo’s voice sounded more serious than bevor and Sakura finally turned to him, taking her fingers from where she had pinched her nose. The blood flow had nearly stopped.

“I tried to get a read on the chakra signatures around the area. I’m getting some stable feedback from this direction. I don’t know how far away. Shouldn’t be more that half a clic.”

Izumo gave her a contemplative look.

“Are you ready to move, then?”

Sakura nodded firmly. “It’s just a headache. Backlash was harder than I expected.”

“Very well then. Lead the way. San, you’re second.”

Once across the entirety of the landslide’s path of destruction it wasn’t far until they found themselves at the edge of the steep hillside Sakura had scouted earlier. It was here that Sakura’s eye’s caught on yellow strings of fabric at the same time as the large husky ninken woofed and sniffed up the bark of a still standing tree. 

“Well done, San. Can you tell me where they went?” Sakura would really rather not have to enhance her abused nose again. 

They ended up on a crumbling outcropping of white stone. Beneath her, on large stacked boulders there was an unmistakable trail of red stains that had not washed out despite the continuing drizzle. 

“Good work, Sakura.” Izumo’s hand clasped warmly on her shoulder. In the corner of her eyes, she registered an out-of-place frown on his face. 

She had found them; despite Hana’s belief that it would be unlikely. Relief made her steps light when she followed Izumo down. The boulders opened up onto a ledge that cut deeper into the hill, protected by thick stones overhead from falling debris. Had the men retreated here? If the avalanche had spread this way, they’d have been safe here.

When she finally recognized the human shapes in the shadows of the cave, her stomach fell. The metallic tang in the air was not from her own blooded nose. 

Thick, dark puddles spread across the backmost part of the ledge. Open eyes sat in a greyish face, staring milky into nothing. Where there was supposed to be the second leg, there was only mangled flesh and bone from knee down. 

Sakura’s eyes skipped over to the other figure, slumped sideways over his dead comrade.

There was a purplish bruise running down the left side of his face. His clothes were drenched a deep rusty brown. His chest shuddered in a shallow breath.

Before Sakura could process any further, Izumo already knelt before the second man, fingers flitting over obvious wounds, prodding here and there. 

She took a step over the puddles of mostly dried blood and came closer. 

“Can I… Is there anything we can do?”

Izumo shot her a look and sighed. He stopped his examination of the unconscious man.

“It’s never ended like this for you before, right?”

Sakura mutely shook her head. 

“Hmmm, thought so.” His small grin was more like a grimace. “You were a bit too … involved with finding them despite the chances.”

“Oh. I’ll… work on that… ”

It had been a bit like a puzzlr. Find the pieces, find the correct skills to put them together and get the price. She liked it. She just hadn’t counted on her price to look like this, even with the warning Hana had given her beforehand. It had been fun; like it had always been fun for her to surpass expectations. 

“In any case, we can’t really go on today. It’s too dark and we can’t safely carry him in these consitions. We’ll have to wait until dawn to move him.”

Sakura eyed the dank overhang and fought to keep the trepidation out of her voice. “So, we’re staying here? I mean… we probably shouldn’t leave him by himself?”

Izumo shrugged lightly and finished adjusting the unconscious man where he’d propped him securely between the back wall and a boulder.

“I doubt he’s going to wake, Sakura. But it’s raining anyway and at least here we won’t get any wetter. And yes. It’s the more humane approach.”  
  
He stood and stretched his back. “Come on, help me move away this one here. Otherwise it’ll be a tight fit.”

More humane. Sakura numbly went to the dead man’s shoulders, Izumo generously offering to lift his mangled legs. 

They put him across a narrow, black-rimmed expanse of sealing paper and with a few hand signs the corpse disappeared. 

“I know they don’t usually give those scrolls out to Genin”, Izumo apologized, “but you should try to apply with the quartermaster anyway.” 

In the end, they squeezed in, left and right of the injured man, Sakura gladly accepting the place on the far end of the puddles of half-dried blood. San dutifully took the watch position at the mouth of the cave to scare off potential scavengers.

For a fleeting moment, Sakura wished it was her own companion taking watch until she remembered that despite her fondness for Uhei, he was part of Kakashi-sensei’s pack and she had no idea how to go about getting a trusted summon of her own. 

It was the most restless sleep Sakura had ever had. She had no clear idea of what she dreamed when she actually managed to nod of, but behind her eyelids a dizzying vortex of blood and rain and body parts and dogs swirled. 

In the small hours before dawn broke, the breathing of the injured man next to her stuttered and slowed. When the sky outside their dark abode lightened, it finally stilled completely. 

She knew Izumo was quietly watching her for a reaction.

She didn’t even know what she was supposed to react like. 

“Do you have a second scroll?” The words fell heavy from her lips. Her face felt numb but that was okay because this way she wouldn’t have to school any expressions.

Izumo nodded and they sealed the second body with efficient ease.

The trek back to Hana, Kotetsu and the lumber crew took them less than two hours. There was a hopeful sort of bustling in the makeshift camp that was only slightly dampened by Sakura and Izumo returning with two dead men. 

General consensus was, that while sad for the lost men, most were just glad to be rescued, on the way to being healed and rearing to get back to their homes.

Sakura silently wondered if it had made a difference if they’d decided to press on in the night to reach the camp. Or if the man would have died, regardless. 

“That was some really good work, Sakura.”

Hana’s hand clapped strongly on Sakura’s shoulder where she was wrangling the loose fabric of her fresh long-sleeved shirt into submission with bandages. Her red dress had finally come to the end of its life.

She was already feeling better, being rid of the filthy thing.

“Thanks, Hana-san. Even though…”

“Yes, that was unfortunate…” Hana paused, eyes roaming the clearing, “I’m always… it’s never okay for me, when it ends like this. But… sometimes it does. And often there’s nothing you could have done differently. Some rescue missions just. Don’t have a happy end.” She grimaced as if remembering something specific before it changed to a lopsided grin. “This one was a mixed bag, but it was mostly pretty nice. I mean, we got to heal people instead of, you know...” 

Sakura nodded haltingly. She knew that. But it was jarring. To have her efforts be successful and still useless. 

“In any case”, Hana abruptly changed the subject, “Izumo reported that you found them by chakra signal?”

“Ah, yes. I didn’t know what else to try.” 

“Oh, first time you tried that in the field? Explains the nosebleed. Chakra backlash is a bitch if you aren’t used to it. I can’t really control it so it’s pretty much useless for me.” 

Sakura didn’t think it would add anything to the conversation to admit that she had cobbled together the technique on a hunch and an offhand comment from her weird teacher.   
  
“So, there aren’t many who use it?”

“Naw, most don’t have the chakra control for it. Or the sensitivity. I’m barely good enough for the first and have none of the second.”

“But you’re a medic nin!” Sakura had always thought that all medic nin had to have insanely good chakra control.

Hana laughed throatily. “Different thing. I have no problem with medical chakra and control outside of my body. But I’m really useless with internal manipulation. For that sensing crap, you need both. Besides, I’m an Inuzuka. We don’t need chakra props for tracking.” Her sharp grin was challenging. 

***

They made good time back to Ikanomura. The river was broad enough that it was possible to use log rafts despite the debris the hurricane had left behind and under Yoshi-san’s watchful eyes, Izumo and Kotetsu built enough of them to carry all thirteen men and four ninja safely downstream.

Relief permeated the little village at the return of a large part of their husbands and fathers. There was no overt mention of the two dead workers but Sakura spied Izumo handing over the scrolls in a backroom of the headman’s small office. 

They left for Konoha immediately, despite the offer of housing the team for the night. It was a three-day journey back to the city and none of them felt like dragging the mission out any longer.   
  
Intermittent rain dogged them the whole way and it was a sweaty, bedraggled group, that made it back to mission assignment and reported completion. Sakura was glad that Hana was going to shoulder the bulk of mission report writing. She’d only have to contribute with the part she and Izumo had handled alone.

Trailing vaguely in the wake of her temporary team, Sakura wondered if this was going to be her new normal. Missions that were just… 

Sakura sighed, feeling despondent.

Hana had said it had been a success. The headman of Ikanomura was thankful. The lumber crew was thankful. 

She’d done a good job. 

But it just didn’t matter, in the end.

“Oi, Hana-nee! What’cha doing here? Mom said… Sakura?”

The loud voice ripped her out of her brooding. 

“’Mom said Sakura’? What the hell does that even mean, Kiba? And can’t you say hello anymore?” Hana growled at Inuzka Kiba, who had just rounded the corner that led to the stairs. From the collar of his jacket peeked his ninken’s white head, a drool covered scroll clamped between the dog’s teeth.

“Mom didn’t say Sakura”, Kiba said, annoyance in his voice, “what are you, stupid? Mom said, you forgot to reschedule Hibaki’s appointment and that he’s gonna rip you a new one for that.”

Hana fisted her hand in Ni’s – or was it Ichi’s, they looked perfectly identical – coat and visibly clenched her teeth. “That old fart –“

“I don’t wanna know. I do wanna know what’cha doin’ with Sakura here.” Kiba glared at his sister as if he assumed, she had kidnapped her. 

Sakura wasn’t sure if that much hostility between siblings was a normal thing. 

“You know her?”  
“You know Sakura?”

Kotetsu’s and Hana’s voices rang down the corridor and a few of the hurrying administration nin shot them annoyed looks.   
  
There was a slightly baffled look on Kiba’s face. “She’s… my classmate. Or was. You know, in the Academy that I graduated from three months ago? You know, that one girl that always got into fights with the Yamanaka over the Uchiha bastard when -”

“You’re a rookie?”

“Had me fooled there…”

“Sure she’s a rookie!”, Kiba’s voice cut over Kotetsu’s and Izumo’s interruptions, “Got put with the Uchiha and dumb Naruto, though. Tough luck.” He shrugged apologetically in Sakura’s direction. 

There was something odd in Hana’s gaze when she looked over to Sakura.

“Well, damn… at least now I know who recommended you…” It was muttered lowly and Sakura wasn’t sure if she was even supposed to hear it. The apprehension in Hana’s voice sent unease sliding down her back. 

Sakura had no idea why Hana seemed to be so nervous about linking her to Kakashi-sensei

***

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why is Hana apprehensive about Kakashi-sensei? He's weird, sure, and annoying sometimes but...


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura is sure that Kakashi-sensei always chooses the worst team missions on purpose. This one might be even worse than the better-forgotten-one with the biting geese...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again and welcome to this dawn of a new era!  
> There are new vaccines, new chapters, new presidents... all sparkly new :)
> 
> There is a lot of stuff I could probably comment on but let's just keep it nicely non-political and kids friendly.
> 
> So far, it doesn't look like I'll be back on the biweekly schedule next month but I did have a bit of time and inspiration to write, so there are a few successive and nearly finished chapters already waiting. It's just, stuff keeps popping up that needs to be addressed and a few of the older chapters start to get ridiculously long due to all the additions... Good for you, I guess... ;)

* * *

  
“… and then she was all like ‘I told you it wasn’t thieves stealing your eggs and potatoes, you idiot’” Naruto’s voice took on a high falsetto tone when he imitated the farmer’s crabby wife. “Well, I mean there were thieves but they didn’t steal the eggs but-“

“- the farmer’s wife’s rings, yes, I got that Naruto”, Sakura interrupted the third retelling of ‘The Story about the Fat Farmer and the Racoons’, alternately titled ‘The Time Naruto Saved A Marriage And The Day.’

“So so so, what about your mission, Sakura-chan? Did you have to fight, too?”, Naruto seamlessly changed the topic, not at all bothered by her lack of enthusiasm.

“Um, no. It was a Search and Rescue”, Sakura shrugged and kept her eyes on Sasuke, who was doing rather interesting things with five kunai at once. Was he trying to change their direction in mid-flight? Physics kind of made that endeavor unlikely to succeed without losing much of the impulse, though…

“Oh. Sounds kinda boring”, Naruto deflated, “I thought it was more… I dunno… I mean it was with Chuunin, yanno?”

“Erm… Chuunin don’t always fight?”, Sakura offered, slightly annoyed. Her mission wasn’t boring. Well, it was, if one’s whole definition of ‘interesting’ consisted of ‘there’s bad-ass fighting’. 

It wasn’t as if smoking out a family of raccoons that ransacked a farm was particularly heroic, right? Even if it did turn out that there was also a thief involved. And in any case, if she got this right, then it was mostly Sasuke-kun who did the fighting part of their mission, if it could be called that. 

Subduing an Academy drop-out come thief didn’t sound all that spectacular, either.

“Then what was your mission even about, Sakura-chan?”

Sakura forced her gaze off Sasuke and turned to her blond teammate. Naruto had three clones doing water walking on the narrow but fast running stream that bisected their training ground and another one was puzzling over an academy textbook about proper mission protocol. 

It looked terribly bored.

Obviously, Kakashi-sensei had taught Naruto about pacing and overkill while she wasn’t looking. Although, the additional help that the Kage Bunshin offered were probably a gladly taken advantage for sensei; there was a lot of catching up her teammate had to do on academy stuff and his chakra control was still spotty at best. 

“Like the name suggests”, Sakura offered, “we searched for some people that were missing due to a hurricane and then rescued them. There wasn’t even supposed to be any fighting during it so it’s not like I …was cheated out of something.”

“So you totally rocked it then?”

“…I suppose?” Sakura thought briefly of a dirty corpse with a torn-off leg and a dying man with purple bruised skin.

Sasuke snorted and threw a glance over at them.

“Dobe, she’s a tracker and support”, he eyed her consideringly, “not much of a fighter, though.” 

That shouldn’t have stung as it did. Wasn’t she over wanting his approval already? He was even right, after all. The senbon that Kakashi-sensei had carelessly thrown her way didn’t really up her fighting power and she wasn’t sure they were even supposed to. It seemed more like an exercise to keep her occupied, to be honest. She wasn’t proving to be any good at it, either.

“Hah! But she doesn’t have to fight! We fight and Sakura-chan supports us an-“

“Do you even know what ‘support’ means in this case, usuratonkachi?”,Sasuke said derisively.

“Of course I know what it means”, Naruto blustered, face scrunched obnoxiously.

“Oh, do tell, then…”, Sasuke goaded, “or are the words you need for that too big for your brain?”

“Oh, you bastard, bastard!!!”

“Goooood morning, boys! And girl.”

As if summoned by the brewing fight, Kakashi-sensei turned up in a puff of smoke, one hand burrowed in the neckline of Naruto’s shirt to keep him from charging, the other one planting his ever present book flat in Sasuke’s face to achieve the same.

“Hn.” 

Looking slightly ruffled and not at all chastised, Sasuke turned away and rubbed his squashed nose. Naruto didn’t manage to get out of the affair that elegantly, though. There was a ripping sound, Kakashi took a step back, and Naruto stumbled forward, orange shirt ripped down one side.

“What the- Kakashi-senseeeeiii!” Naruto looked betrayed at the Jounin. 

Sasuke hastily hid his face. Was he laughing?

Sakura wasn’t entirely sure that this was how teams were supposed to function.

*** 

“We have a mission”, their teacher told them when Naruto’s ire had finally been allayed. The boy now sported one of Sasuke’s white undershirts and still looked somewhat miffed at Kakashi-sensei. Said Jounin had actually apologized quite seriously, something that had Sakura wondering. He looked contrite even now, leaning slightly closer to Naruto than usual and giving him more of his attention.

It didn’t look like either of the boys noticed the odd behavior, though. 

It was only a T-shirt. Naruto could easily just get another one, couldn’t he? But, thinking on it, Naruto was awfully protective of his possessions, even at the Academy. Maybe there was a story there that Sakura wasn’t privy to but Kakashi-sensei was?

“What kind?” Sasuke asked, long-sufferingly, when no one else reacted.

“It’s a C-rank - but only by virtue of being quite a ways away.” The tack-on didn’t do anything to lift the downturn of Naruto’s and Sasuke’s mouths. 

“Boooooring…” Naruto muttered.

Kakashi-sensei sighed. “It’s a joint mission with team eight-“

Here Naruto interrupted with a loud groan and a string of quiet insults towards ‘dog-breath’.

“- and takes place on a farm 220 clicks north of Konoha”, he finished over Naruto’s grumbling. “Which is why it gained the C-rank.”

The further north, the closer it was to Kusa. And while the small nation were tentative allies since the third shinobi war, the same could not be said for either Kumo or Iwa, whose influence stretched – thinly but noticeable - to the border areas on either side of Kusa. While border patrols were tight in those areas, they thinned noticeably more than 2 days at ninja-speed away from them and weren’t available either for support of green genin. 

So every mission that exceeded a 200 kilometer radius north of Konoha was automatically not D-ranked, even if any border was still several days of ninja-run away. 

“The farm has recently changed hands and the new owner wants completely new fencing for his cattle, which, incidentally, has to be caught by team eight, since due to a lack of upkeep by his late father, the highly prized meat supply escaped into the unknown.”

Kakashi-sensei’s voice was a dull drone as if he was reciting a cookbook instead of mission parameters.

Sakura found she was suddenly totally on Naruto’s side. This was going to be desperately boring. Judging by Sasuke’s expression, he thought so, too.

It took them the better part of three days to travel the distance. 

Sakura was ambling along behind Sasuke-kun, Naruto behind her, and was silently stewing in boredom. They were going at a light jog cutting through the dense woodlands on a narrow footpath, but Sakura, for the life of her, didn’t know why Kakashi-sensei hadn’t just taken them to the trees already. 

When she’d tried to suggest it the day before, she’d gotten bumped on the head with sensei’s horrid book and then sent on hunting duty. 

Likewise, today she’d been derailed two times already. Once, with ‘scouting’ and once with having to fill their water bottles in a river that she conveniently had to find, first. She heaved a deep sigh, shooting a baleful glare at the Jounin behind her. His long legs made it look like he was out on an afternoon stroll rather than on a mission. 

She knew for a fact that an average Jounin was able to travers as much as 400km a day, nearly double that, if pressed. Even she as a Genin had managed to make it half that with Hana’s team and none of them were close to Jounin level.

It was easy, too. Travelling by the canopy path cost nothing more than a bit of chakra for muscle enhancement, little enough that even she could spare it, and moderate attention to chakra control to not slip. Only navigation was slightly harder from up in the trees as soon as one left behind the premade paths. 

Oh.

Right. 

Maybe Kakashi-sensei was trying to see if her teammates could navigate the normal way before having them do it from above? Still. It was so boring. 

And with the sun sinking behind them, the sound of the cicadas seemed to triple. Her mind was growing fuzzy with sleepy boredom. If they didn’t have to hurry anyway then why were they still running? 

She yawned sleepily.

Really, it wasn’t like they had to be there soon. There was nothing pressing for them-

What. What were they doing again? 

Sakura blearily forced her eyes to open against the setting sun. Something was… She frowned. She was so tired. She should really just rest-

No, wait.

Her foot caught on something, the chakra supporting her muscles flickering. 

What was- 

She blinked rapidly, edges of her vision slightly fuzzy. 

“Kai.” With a sharp flex of her chakra, the red glow of a nonexistent setting sun receded and she slipped a kunai in her hand, senses strained-

“Well, that took you long enough…” 

Kakashi-sensei’s murmur was a mixture of chiding and amused, where his long strides kept him easily behind her. He didn’t even look up from his book when he passed her. 

“Off you go! Or are you already tired, Sakura-kun?”

Silently fuming, she upped her pace and followed in his wake, Sasuke and Naruto quite a distance further down the path. 

They hadn’t even noticed that she’d slowed down. 

A raindrop hit her cheek. She glared at the overhung sky that had threatened with rain since morning already and hurried after the vanishing figures of her teammates and her stupid sensei.

*** 

When Sakura arrived at their camp after extricating herself from the probably twentieth Genjutsu that had ensnared her, Sasuke and Naruto were sparring in the dry space a small overhang provided. She slumped over to where Kakashi-sensei was lounging on a fallen tree trunk, clothes barely even damp despite the veritable deluge that had hit in the late afternoon. 

Sakura grumpily plucked at her red quipao. It clung to her in streaks of mud and rainwater. “Ah, you’re finally here. You missed training!”, her ass of a teacher had the gall to greet her with. 

“You…!”

“Me?” The one visible pale brow lifted mockingly and the eye that belonged to it travelled over her sodden form. “You look like you hugged a tree.”

Sakura grit her teeth at the hot blush that rose in her face. 

“No, really?!”, Kakashi-sensei gasped with fake concern, “Now why would you do something like that?”

“Sensei, I hate you so much right now.”

“Mou, don’t be mean. It’s only for your best!”

Sakura didn’t think this deserved a verbal response. Kakashi-sensei was clearly a sadist that loved to torture his genin and she wouldn’t give him any more ammunition.

“Boys! Cut it out, your teammate finally made it!”

There was some last ditch tripping and then Naruto barreled over to them. Sasuke followed at a more leisurely pace behind.

“Hey, Sakura-chan! Are you okay? You look terrible!” Earnest blue eyes peered at her. “Are you tired? I can totally get some wood for a fire! And food!”

“Tch. Don’t be so loud, Idiot. And she’s been on a Chuunin mission, she shouldn’t complain about a bit of mud.”

There was a derisive tilt to his lips when she caught his gaze but when she turned away she thought there was an odd look on his face for a small moment, something narrow and nearly angry.

It was gone before she could decide if it was a trick of the meagre lighting.

They found shelter for the night under the semi-dry overhang the boys had used as a sparring arena, a merry little fire crackling away between them. Kakashi-sensei didn’t make any mention of guard shifts even though this night they were clearly out of the green zone that stretched along permanent patrol routes and around cities and outposts. 

Sasuke and Naruto were already asleep by the time Sakura had finally finished to clean her sodden clothes from the worst of the woodland debris. 

She felt uncomfortable in her bedroll. Naruto was snoring loud enough to count as a health hazard, Sasuke kept turning and turning and Sakura couldn’t make out anything from her place boxed in between those two, the damp stone wall and the bright light of the fire. 

Giving up on sleep after the fourth time she saved Sasuke’s travel pillow from feeding the flames, she silently peeled herself out of her blanket. 

Kakashi-sensei was nowhere to be seen from her position but she was reasonably sure that he was sitting somewhere further out in a tree, keeping watch.

He hadn’t even asked how her mission went, when they met at the training grounds two days ago. Quite the contrary, he hadn’t given her another glance, seemingly focused on either Naruto and Sasuke’s permanent bickering or distracting them with silly little stealth games that they were unbelievably bad at.

And whenever she had approached him, she’d been more or less shoed away on an errand. 

The thought of his meaningless smiles sat sour in her stomach. 

She’d done well on her first own mission! She wanted to… she wanted… 

Sakura silently stood with her back to the fire and stared unblinkingly into the dark forest. 

She wanted him to acknowledge her.

She wanted his praise.

With a toneless sigh, she closed her eyes, annoyed at herself. Hadn’t she been over this with Sasuke already? Pretending to need acknowledgement from someone else? Maybe she was just projecting because she’d been so forceful in stamping out that stupid infatuation.

Maybe the amount of involvement Kakashi-sensei showed was normal. She was doing fine without him as her soundboard, after all, and if he wanted to know about her mission he could probably just look up the mission report. Maybe he even had, already.

On silent feet, she crossed over to the fallen tree trunk that had doubled as Kakashi-sensei’s couch in the afternoon and tuned in to the sounds of the forest. Now that Naruto’s snores weren’t reverberating inside her skull anymore, she dared to enhance her hearing again.

Instantly, she felt less blind.

There was a rustle of paper pages to her left and through the canopies, Sakura thought she could make out the dull glint of a headband.

Kakashi-sensei was so obvious. And even if for whatever reason he didn’t want to talk to her about her mission, she did have questions. This was pretty much an invitation.

When she finally scaled the sturdy tree he hid in, she’d stumbled into at least four mud holes and one ant hill on the way over. Not that she would ever admit to it. She was absolutely convinced Kakashi-sensei had chosen his tree for its annoyingly fortified position alone and she wouldn’t give him this satisfaction.

Still, his gaze lingered on her sandals and her feet, squelching wetly in them.

There was probably a trick to avoid sinking into the mud. She’d find it.

While the back of her mind ran away with thoughts on adapting the Chakra distribution of water walking, she settled herself against the trunk, well outside of Kakashi-sensei’s large bubble of personal space. He didn’t glance at her again and Sakura took the time to inconspicuously flick the last of the ants off her leggings.

When the mud on her shoes had already turned stiff, Sakura finally gave in. Kakashi-sensei clearly didn’t want to talk, so she’d keep it short.

“I found that technique for chakra sensing that you mentioned”, she whispered to his left shoulder.

“Hm. I don’t remember mentioning anything specific.”

Unseen, Sakura rolled her eyes at the lackadaisical answer.

“You didn’t. I managed it anyway. But is there a trick to it? The chakra backlash is really bad…”

His book sank a few centimeters.

“Where did you learn the handsigns?” 

“There are handsigns to the technique? I thought it was pure chakra control…” 

That would certainly explain why she kept having the feedback problem. Handsigns would make it so much easier. Kakashi-sensei’s book dangled over his knee and he finally turned his face to her.

There was something pinched around his visible eye.

“Indeed, there are handsigns to almost any technique.”

Sakura thought there was no reason to sound so exasperated. How was she to know just from his vague hints?

“So, what are they?” she asked impatiently, “I’d really like to avoid the migraine and nosebleed combo.”

Kakashi-sensei’s shoulders drooped slightly.

“Well, mostly they are probably unnecessary for you, now,” his voice was droll, “but try it with Snake. Since it is aligned with Yin-chakra heavy techniques it should help with the filtering aspect. And Sakura-kun…”

He raised his brow, looking pained.

“Please do consider that brain hemorrhaging due to chakra backlash is a Very Bad Thing. Do not play with Sensing and Genjutsu without telling anyone beforehand. Otherwise, I’ll have to consider sending you for medical lessons… to illustrate.”

Sakura felt like the proverbial scolded puppy caught at the scruff of her neck.

“… Okay, Kakashi-sensei…”

But really, how was she supposed to know that! 

“Was there… anything else?”

Sakura fought to keep a mutinous glare off her face. It wasn’t like she routinely forced techniques. Or made him any kind of trouble. Kakashi-sensei was unreasonably wary, really.

“Yes, actually. How do I get body scrolls?”

For a long second, she thought Kakashi-sensei would refuse to answer, his body suddenly tense and face blank where there was exasperation, before.

Then, though she didn’t see any obvious movement, he relaxed back into his slouch against the tree trunk; his gaze was still removed, though.

“Nowhere, usually,” he exhaled in a small huff, “I’ll put in an exception for you with the Quartermaster.”

Then, he dropped off the tree backwards without warning and landed soundlessly. 

“Since you’re up anyway, you might as well take care of my watch for me. I’ll do a scouting round instead.”

Then he vanished from her sight.

Her ears followed him for another five seconds until all sounds from him stopped abruptly. 

“Well… thanks, I guess,” she muttered into the dark and settled against the spot sensei had occupied. 

He very, very clearly didn’t want to further talk with her, if his disappearing act was anything to go by.   
  
By the time the first light hit the treetops, Sakura slunk back to their small camp and busied herself stroking the fire back to life. 

When she finally progressed to stowing away her bedroll, stepping lightly between her two sleeping teammates, she found, neatly ordered into the scroll holders of her backpack, five narrow, black rimmed bands of sealing paper. 

And while she was definitely thankful now, there was a niggling thought at the back of her head that kept wondering if Kakashi-sensei always took that many body scrolls on Genin-rank missions like this. 

***

They arrived at the farm two hours after breaking camp with a sparse breakfast in their stomachs. Why Kakashi-sensei had them camp in the wet wild when there was a perfectly nice, if anxious, young farmer offering them perfectly nice bedrooms in a perfectly nice farmhouse – well, that was anyone’s guess. 

Sakura pretended she couldn’t hear Sasuke’s teeth gnashing. His black hair was sprinkled with mud from his and Naruto’s spar the evening before and he looked like he really hadn’t liked the rain that had continued to drizzle for the whole night. 

Naruto was completely unruffled. 

“Very well, Watanabe-san, we’ll start at the eastern edge, if you don’t mind, and meet up with Yuuhi-san’s team here in the evening.”

The man, maybe in his early twenties, rung his hands nervously and pushed his glasses further up his nose.

“Yes, yes, I don’t mind at all. Please do as you think best.” He looked around the trampled, muddy, field that extended further north and his shoulders slumped. “I have no idea what my father was thinking! It’s just cows! Why would he pay so much money for them?! And then not even repairing the fences? Really?!”

“Maa, there’s no need to be upset, Watanabe-san. We’ll find your produce and take care of the rest.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, mister! You’ll have the best fence in all of fire country!” Naruto gave a thumbs up and a sunny smile that seemed to at least pick up the young farmer’s mood a small bit.

The work was grueling in the worst ways. There were swampy mud patches, mosquitos, unrelenting heat, blood sucking bugs, warm rain, more bugs… When the sun finally took pity on the mud streaked, sweaty Genin and decided to dip behind the tree line circling the expansive farm, even the ever perky spikes of Naruto’s hair were drooping in damp exhaustion. 

“I didn’t think I could hate a jutsu”, the boy grumbled despondently, looking for all the world like his favorite childhood fantasy had been gruesomely killed, “but if I ever have to make holes again with this stupid earth jutsu, I’ll…”

“Maa, Naruto-kun, you promised Watanabe-san the best fence in Hi no Kuni, if I remember correctly… We still have more than half of the fence to rebuild!”

Naruto’s hands twitched at his sides.

Sasuke mouthed ‘more than half’ tonelessly and scowled at the muddy ground, absently swatting at the cloud of buzzing bugs that followed them. 

“Hey, dobe. Let’s switch tomorrow.” 

“Huh?”

“Tomorrow. Let’s switch jutsu. You let me copy the earth one and I… I’ll teach you the Fuuton for wood cutting.”

Naruto’s face lit up as if it was his birthday. 

Sakura rubbed at her paint stained fingers with a frown. And what about her? She’d been lugging rough-cut lumber until she had splinters even in her bum, then she’d painted the fence where Naruto’s clones had finished nailing the beams together until her head throbbed from the fumes and she remembered to cut the chakra she habitually trickled into her nose. All the while dispelling Kakashi-sensei’s stupid Genjutsu that had her tripping into the holes Naruto made for the fence, or painting trees, or – once – one of the clones. 

She had barely opened her mouth to complain when Kakashi-sensei’s book landed lightly on her head. 

“Sakura’ll be joining Kurenai-sensei tomorrow, by the way. We’ll get Kiba in return!” 

There was much complaining for the rest of the way back, about the mission in general and about Kiba in particular and even Sasuke pitched in with several well placed ‘Hn’s’. 

Sakura wasn’t sure if she should be offended that despite their mutual dislike of the Inuzuka her teammates didn’t even try to make her stay with them instead. On the other hand, not having to be in the middle of Naruto’s and Sasuke’s daily spats sounded nice. 

She slipped away silently when their ire turned from Kiba’s general offensiveness towards each other again. She didn't think they'd notice her lack of input.

* * *


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sakura makes new friends - or at least she's reasonably sure she does. Then, there is Naruto who, Sakura decides should probably get a hazard warning all for himself. He's just unpredicable like that...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again and here's to hoping that everyone has a wonderful christmas time despite the circumstances!
> 
> I have to mention, I was totally BLOWN AWAY by the response to last chapter! I love every single one of your comments and it really makes me smile like a loon whenever I scroll through my inbox. Please don't be offended if I haven't managed to answer to every one of your comments. I am honestly trying between RL and this but there was a point last week where I had to decide between editing and writing or answering comments and just... 
> 
> So, this is for all of you that didn't get a reply to you comment!

* * *

*******

**The** second day dawned as humid and hot as the first one had simmered down.

Sakura was awake before the first rays of sunlight crept over the horizon, sleepwear and hair sticking to her skin with tacky sweat. 

Naruto and Sasuke looked completely unbothered, bedrolls strangled into bunched up submission underneath them. Even though the room they were occupying for the duration of the mission was large enough for five of them, the boys had migrated into a tangle of limbs as if they’d been fighting during the night.

Naruto was drooling on Sasuke’s left arm.

Sasuke’s fist was bunched aggressively in Naruto’s ratty orange night shirt.

It looked terribly adorable and Sakura really didn’t want to be there when they woke up and would inevitably start a fight over who was stealing who’s space.

She silently peeled herself out of sticky clothes and into her training dress and tiptoed down the wooden stairs to the first floor. 

They hadn’t seen Team Eight the day before, the other team not coming in before they retired for the night. Though Sakura supposed they must have come back at some point, judging by the amount of mud encrusted ninja sandals that piled up on the stone floor of the entrance area. 

Sakura rounded the corner of the large farmhouse. There was a small orchard at it’s back with well maintained persimmon and peach trees. The carefully cut grass underneath their canopies was a far cry from the trampled mud that constituted the better part of the land adjacent to the house.

She fell into a light series of stretches and strengthening exercises, soft grass tickling her bare toes.

She’d quickly gotten better strength-wise as soon as she had put in the smallest amount of effort. Finally quitting the diets, now that there was no reason to avoid building up muscles, had been a relieve.

She was really missing a sparring partner, though. Her Taijutsu had remained stuck at Academy level for the last three months since graduation and without real-life experience or a hands-on teacher it would stay that way.

And she could probably put a lot of descriptors on Kakashi-sensei but ‘hands-on’, he was not.

Her decision on ‘teacher’ was still out.

She wasn’t sure if dumping her on other teams or Uhei and Pakkun and mocking her with half-sentences about oblique chakra techniques counted as teaching. 

The consistent buzzing of a cloud of bugs that swarmed around her head finally had her give up on the more strenuous of her exercises. For the umpteenth time she swept her hands though them in hopes of keeping at least a few of them away. They were an especially ugly and persistent breed, apparently.

“Please don’t,” a quiet voice at her back said, “They are rare.”

Heart lurching, Sakura swiveled around. 

Shino stood in the shade of the first row of trees. His greenish-grey trench coat let him blend eerily into the sunlight-dappled mossy tree trunks.

A cloud of the ugly bugs mingled with his own, much smaller, Kikaichuu. 

Sakura hadn’t noticed him approach. 

So much for her sharpening her senses for tracking! Though, she had to admit that she had completely forgotten to enhance her nose again after the paint-disaster from the previous day. And anyway, it probably wasn’t recommended to have chakra saturate the pathways there all the time for a beginner. It certainly felt like they itched after a long day of training. 

Hopefully that was a process of establishing a habit. 

“Ahh, I’m sorry,” Sakura put down her hands and did her best to disregard the creepy crawlies that tried to skittle into her eyes and nose. 

It was going to be a really long day, if she wasn’t allowed to squish them while working with Team Eight.

Shino didn’t answer.

Sakura really wanted to leave for the relatively less bug-infested farmhouse. Leaving Shino to keep standing here on his own was probably really rude, though. There was a tickling sensation slowly moving down along her spine. Sakura wasn’t sure if it was sweat or little insect legs. 

“So… you came out here for the wildlife?”

The silence slowly turned awkward.

Finally, Shino tilted his head and then he and his cloud of bugs came closer. 

“No, I did not.”

He stopped barely two meters in front of her and like an eerie suction device, the cloud of bugs above Shino’s head swallowed all the critters that heretofore tried to land on her own sweat-damp skin. 

Sakura’s eyes unwillingly followed the mesmerizing patterns that took shape around her classmate.

“Are you sure?”

Silence persisted for a long moment.

“Yes, quite,” came the dry answer.

And if Sakura wasn’t absolutely sure that there was a village-wide consensus that Aburame in general and Shino in particular did not posses an iota of humour, she’d have to swear that her classmate was amused.

She narrowed her eyes.

“Then, what are you doing here?”

Shino tilted his head in the other direction and shifted his hands underneath the voluminous sleeves of his coat.

Sakura felt a bit like… well, probably like an insect under an Aburame’s microscope. 

“Why am I here, you ask? Because I wanted to observe you.”

Obviously.

Sakura forced herself to take a slow, deep breath. It didn’t look like this conversation was going anywhere.

“And… why? Do you want to … observe me?”

Shino leaned a bit closer and the buzzing of his insects intensified. 

“Why? Because Kiba mentioned you.”

That… really didn’t explain anything. But Shino didn’t give off the vibe of being very good at explanations. Or at least, it didn’t look like he wanted to explain anything to her, specifically. She remembered clearly that his technical explanations at the Academy had been quite a bit more verbose. 

“That’s nice of him. I ran a mission with his sister.”

She slowly inched around her classmate intending to get back to the house and grab some breakfast. Someone had to be awake by now. Preferably someone who was a bit more well versed with conversations. 

Sasuke, maybe.

“That, he said,” Shino finally answered and kept up with her.

She could imagine that. Probably in a mixture of affront and suspicion, judging by the way he had reacted at the Tower. She was a bit surprised that he was keeping his distance and had not pestered her with questions yet. 

Or had he actually sent Shino to spy on her?

Well.

No.

She nearly snorted at the thought. Too much subterfuge for someone like Kiba. 

When they reached the house, Shino courteously let her go in first, inclining his head slightly as she passed.

It felt like a mocking bow but Sakura wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t just imagining things. 

“I do look forward to working with you, Sakura-san.”

Okay, so there definitely was something like a grin in his voice now. 

It was shaping up to be a weird morning.

***

  
The day was clearly trying to keep it’s early promise.

Hinata, as timid in her oversized beige blouse as Sakura remembered from Academy days, looked weirdly intimidating when she turned on her Byakugan. 

If anyone were to ask her, Sakura would have to say that the Sharingan was definitely the prettier of the two legendary dojutsu. She just hoped that when this happened, Sasuke was out of earshot. 

He’d hate having a ‘pretty’ anything.

Or being less intimidating than mousey Hinata.

And while she was on the topic of intimidation; Shino, with swarms of innumerable bugs streaming out from under his sleeves didn’t look harmless either. The both of them together had made quite the serious image, Hinata giving Byakugan-assisted direction and Shino managing his bugs like a conductor.

Their teamwork looked flawless. 

Even if the both of them were only trying to find the last missing heifers of Watanabe-san’s overpriced herd of cows.

Sakura’s own task was to replace Kiba and one of his Inuzuka techniques. She had to herd the, well, herd in the right direction without it ending in a stampede. 

“Okay then, Sakura-san. Try it out yourself.”

Sakura felt for her smoothly moving chakra. The False Surrounding Technique as Genjutsu relied on the precise application of Yin Chakra. It would latch onto the victim’s coils and hijack the chakra pathways leading to the diencephalon – part of every mammal’s forebrain - and subsequently open the door to subvert their sensory input.

Thankfully, Sakura didn’t have to separate the Yin part of her chakra by herself. The prerequisite handsigns would take that over until she got a good enough feeling for it that she could cut that part out of the sequence. 

She carefully shaped the chakra according to the signs design; she had no idea how, exactly the input was generated from the intended image she was supposed to keep in her mind’s eye but she supposed it had to do with the increased chakra flow she could feel sneaking up her cerebral pathways in an extra loop.

Then she let the Yin chakra net envelope the area her victim, Kurenai-sensei in this case, was in and kept her hold on it until she felt a tug. Her sensing training was coming in useful, here. 

Kurenai-sensei stood still; the illusion had caught, Sakura could still feel the slight buzzing of her own chakra technique interfering with her system.

Team Eight’s teacher frowned and turned slightly, moving her head this way and that. The illusion still held strong, the interference pattern on Sakura’s senses didn’t lessen.

Shino had stopped his meditation and was slowly coming over to stand beside Hinata whose gaze jumped skittishly between her teacher and Sakura. 

Sakura fought down her latent but probably misplaced irritation. She’d long since left behind that girl ashamed of her big forehead and the self-consciousness that had followed her everywhere. Even before her girly Academy persona.

She really hoped Hinata would grow out of this low self-esteem phase, soon. She seemed to be really good in her tracking team and Sakura had really now idea where her problems stemmed from. Hinata was plenty talented, after all.

“Byakugan,” she whispered, vessels around her pale eyes bulging.

“What can you observe, Hinata-san,” her teammate asked quietly.

“I-it looks beau-beautiful. Th-the ch-chakra, I m-mean. N-nearly as sm-mooth as wh-when K-kurenai-s-sensei showed m-me with K-kiba-k-kun.”

Shino turned to set his hidden stare on Sakura.

“Hmm,” was his very eloquent answer and Sakura felt her shoulders bunch tighter. She’d hoped he would become a bit more approachable as the day wore on. But apparently, she’d been mistaken. As if one nearly-mute in her bunch of graduates wasn’t enough, already.

For a second, the boy was still. Then, one of his barely visible eyebrows lifted. 

“Why I am surprised, you ask,” he said, “because I was not aware that you have experience already in weaving Genjutsu.”

Sakura could nearly swear that there was an amused tremble to his usual monotone. Or maybe it was a mocking one, she wasn’t sure. Considering the way he had acted earlier in the orchard, she’d put her money on either one. 

She definitely wouldn’t be fooled again by people saying that the Aburame were such a serious bunch. 

“I don’t, actually,” she allowed but kept her eye on him. If he was annoying her on purpose then she wanted to catch him in the act.

Kurenai-sensei chose that moment to break the illusion. Sakura felt it vanishing like unraveling strings.

“That was very well crafted, Sakura. Did Kakashi already go over the theory with you?”

“Not really,” Sakura shrugged. “At least I don’t think so? I did some chakra sensitivity training but that was for sensing. And on the way here I had to fight a few illusions he cast on me. If that counts?”

Kurenai-sensei heaved a weary sigh before visibly rallying herself.

“Chakra sensitivity training is…,” she interrupted herself with a small, huffed laugh, “ah, well. We can definitely count that as relevant training. Bit lacking in the theory part but… Anyway, why, do you think, does it also count as Genjutsu training?”

Sakura suddenly felt really dumb. Spelled out like that it was obvious; she’d even noticed it while casting the False Surroundings Technique.

“Because I can feel not only personal chakra signals but also the signals of non-instantaneous chakra techniques. Like Genjutsu. Right now, I felt how I cast it on you, I knew that it stayed active and I felt when you broke out. But… I think I even used it before?”

She thought for a bit. It was hard to explain.

“I mean, when casting it I kind of… adapted the… the net? To fit you better. Does that make any sense?”

Kurenai-sensei’s eyebrows were nearing her hairline. 

“It does, actually. As I said, you really crafted the technique very well. It’s a very technical aspect of Genjutsu that most never fully get behind. Most lack either the skill with chakra manipulation or the instinct to use it.”

“So… I guess my attempt was okay, then?”

Kurenai-sensei laughed. “Yes, Sakura. Your attempt was more than okay. Your imagery could use some work, to be on par with you technical skills, though. In the end, it’s what makes or breaks a successful illusion. But these things take time.”

That wasn’t so bad, Sakura decided. She’d never been the most creative girl, so lacking that spark was probably to be expected. It was why she had never really been taken with the concept of Genjutsu when it had been introduced at the Academy.

Ino would probably be good at that part.

Though, she supposed for mundane stuff like this, she had imagination enough.

“Y-you are r-really g-g-good, S-Sakura-s-san. A-at th-the A-academy, y-you…”, Hinata’s voice, starting moderate, dwindled off but Sakura could guess at the rest of the sentence.

So Kiba had probably talked about her and his sister. And, she supposed, she did act very much different from her Academy front. The lack of Sasuke-centric topics had to be a dead giveaway.

Funny, though, that it was quiet and shy Hinata who confronted her first.

Well, if ‘confronting’ was the correct word for her complimentary approach at interrogation.

Self-consciously, Sakura shrugged. Being called out wasn’t feeling so nice. It made her feel like fraud and since she still wasn’t completely sure what had been real and what not, it was especially awkward.

“Um, yes, that. I… it was a bit like a game, at the Academy but…,” what was she even supposed to say? That she nearly went native in her own disguise?

“A-ah, Sakura-san. Every-everbody plays a g-game, a b-bit, r-right? Y-yours w-was v-very g-good. B-but how d-did you l-learn… w-why…,” she trailed off, obviously unsure of how to formulate her question and instead gestured at Sakura at large.

How did she go from fangirl to ninja? She couldn’t just outright say that she’d been actively suppressing this part and that the whole ruse had been to not, actually, seem talented.

“I guess I lacked the right reasons? Or maybe rather… the will to chance it?”

The second reason sounded better. More like the truth, in any case, no matter that it was meant to be misinterpreted by her audience. She certainly had lacked the will to chance being recognized as special and graduated despite her parents’ obvious fear. 

Hinata looked as if she had suddenly had some kind of epiphany. 

“…not l-lack st-strength, th-they l-lack ww-will.”

Sakura nearly didn’t hear the whispered words. 

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“P-p-people d-do…n-not l-lack st-strength, th-they l-lack w-will,” Hinata repeated, only marginally louder, “O-tou-s-sama a-always ssays th-this.”

Kurenai-sensei behind her muttered something that sounded like “of course he would”.

Sakura shrugged. “ A bit like that, I think. But maybe you have to find a motivation first. Like… exposing a weakness to yourself is the first step towards strength. Isn’t there a quote that goes like that?”

There was a peculiar expression on Kurenai-sensei’s face when Sakura looked at her. “It… goes a bit differently, Sakura-san…,” she raised her gaze to the sky, damp with threatening monsoon clouds and sighed.

“But since we’re on the topic of sayings… My favorite would be ‘seize the day’, my dear team. So let’s keep working, shall we?”

“B-but…”

“Yes, Hinata?”

“W-we f-forgot Shi-shino’s… f-favorite s-s-saying…”

There was a tremble in her otherwise innocent voice that set Sakura's inner suspicion detector on a muted ringing.

As one, Team Eight’s sensei and Hinata turned to the boy. Sakura wasn’t so sure she wanted to know.  
  
“So, what’s yours then, Shino?” Kurenai-sensei prompted, with an amused tilt to her lips that had Sakura thinking she was used to such byplay.

There was a long pause.

When Sakura turned back to him, he had his arms crossed, hands hidden in his sleeves and contemplated her with his head leaned slightly to the side. 

It would probably be something consisting of barely two words… 

“My favourite saying, you ask?” His eyebrows rose behind his dark glasses.

“That would be ‘Silence is golden’.”

…or that.

Well, she could have seen that one coming.

Hinata stifled a giggle with her sleeve. Yes, she was definitely in on it.

Kurenai-sensei rolled her eyes with a fond smile.

“You two… Stop messing around and go locate your marked heifers. Sakura, get them to calmly follow those two into the paddy. The challenge here is to keep track of all the single illusions you cast. Understand?”

Sakura nodded, eying her temporary teammates warily. They nearly exuded silent amusement. Team Eight was a really weird bunch. Effective and scary, but weird. 

  
*** 

“Sakura, I feel like I should ask you something.”

Kurenai-sensei held her back when Shino and Hinata dashed off to do a final inspection of the rescued herd, after a long day of collecting the frightened cows. 

The evening sun was peaking through the uniform clouds at the edges of the tree tops and the humidity had taken a sudden and unwelcome rise. The next set of monsoon showers was probably at their doorstep.

“Yes?”

Kurenai-sensei looked slightly uncomfortable. It was really nice of Team Eight’s teacher to make her emotions so obvious to her charges. It looked like Kiba, Hinata and Shino had really lucked out on the teacher front.

“You said that Kakashi cast illusions on you on your way here and had you break them?”

“Yes. It was really annoying at first. But I think I got faster at dismissing them in the end.”

Sakura shrugged. The last three of them had been more of an annoyance than hindrances. But she supposed that, too, was thanks to the sensitivity training. The buzzing against her own chakra network had clued her in very fast that something was not right.

“Did he… use his Sharingan to cast the illusions? At all?”

Kurenai-sensei’s eyes were very serious. And now it was Sakura who felt uncomfortable.

“No, I don’t think so. I mean… would I even notice if he did?”

“Ah… possibly. You… would probably stand a chance to at least recognize it at one point. It feels different than the illusions I had you cast.”

Silently, they started walking along the white painted fence, on a vague trajectory to catch up with Hinata and Shino before they reached the farmhouse.

Kurenai-sensei’s white and red dress was as immaculate as always, despite the contrary surroundings. In contrast, Sakura felt a bit like a boney street-urchin. As Genjutsu mistress, she supposed, the woman had all the tools to appear as she wanted. For a moment, she wondered if what she saw was even real. Maybe the provocatively used front was just that.

And underneath, the imposing woman was clothed perfectly conformist. 

“Why are you asking,” Sakura finally decided to dig.

“The Sharingan…,” Kurenai-sensei began but interrupted herself, thoughtful. “I’m not trying to undermine you teacher, Sakura, please keep that in mind. He gave me a few very good ideas that brought my Genjutsu skills up to where they are now. So, I do respect him. A lot.”

That sounded like the introduction to something really ominous. On the other hand, everything that concerned Kakashi-sensei was either ominous, like his ruthlessly killing ninken, or ridiculous, like his books and teacher persona.

She nodded quickly and Kurenai-sensei sent her a small, tight smile.

“Illusions cast with the Sharingan use a different hook. You know what a illusion hook is?”

Mutely, Sakura shook her head. She could probably conjecture it but hearing verbal explanations, for once, was really nice. She hadn’t had that pleasure since Iruka-sensei.

“It describes the way an illusion worms its way into the victim’s network. Some use auditory hooks, most visual, a few even sensory. You, for example, mostly relied on a pure chakra hook, making the illusion easier to recognize but harder to break. It’s why I recommended that you should work on your imagery.”

“And the Sharingan… uses neither?”, Sakura suggested.

“Partly. A Sharingan cast illusion predictably has an almost perfect chakra hook. But what makes them so different is, that they rely mostly on inciting an emotional response. In Genjutsu circles, we call it emotional hook even though we aren’t sure of the actual components. Illusionary techniques actually only subvert sensory input. It’s been suggested that the Kekkei Genkai of the Uchiha…”

She interrupted herself with a wry smile.

“This is off topic, I apologize. It’s a hobby.”

“And emotional hooks are dangerous?”, Sakura hazarded a guess. Why else would Kurenai-sensei be concerned about it.  
  
“They can be. They are not… a good training tool, at least. It sometimes is hard to…,” she searched for a word for a moment, “…disentangle from them, I suppose you could say. On occasion, an incorrectly broken Sharingan illusion could have aftereffects for days.” 

Sakura fought a frown. She had cottoned on to the fact that Kakashi-sensei’s Sharingan was probably not his own but still, she thought…

“Kakashi-sensei knows this, though, doesn’t he?”

Kurenai sighed but nodded.

“He does. Look, Sakura, Kakashi is one of the best and most loyal Shinobi that serve Konoha.”

That, Sakura hadn’t yet heard in so many words but the name Hatake Kakashi certainly was one known to the village at large. There were quite a few D-rank missions they’d been on where that had become clear.

“Of those that belong to that small circle, non of them got there by being… considerate or caring of consequences.”

She stopped suddenly and one of her hands landed lightly on Sakura’s shoulders. 

“I’m not saying that he is a cold-hearted…monster, Sakura. What I’m trying to say is, that sometimes an expected gain for Konoha might be worth some collateral damage, that others would… frown at. Do you understand?”

Sakura really wasn’t sure she did. So far, Kakashi-sensei had been rather lackadaisical in his approach to training. Well, positively said. If he had shown any interest at all in training them apart from his usual layered hints and ploys. 

“He scolded me for forcing that chakra sensing technique on a mission without knowing the handsigns,” she offered. That should be a good sign in Kurenai-sensei’s book. 

“He said that it could cause brain hemorrhaging and I’d have to do medical lessons as punishment if I pulled such a stunt again.”

Kurenai blinked a few times in obvious surprise. 

“Well, I suppose that’s something, then.” 

She pinched the bridge of her nose. 

Sakura wasn’t sure what the sarcasm in her voice had been for, though. 

“Just… you can tell me, if things… change. Or Asuma. Sarutobi Asuma,” she added at Sakuras obviously confused face, “He is the sensei of Team Ten. You’re friends with the Yamanaka girl, right?”

“Erm, kind of. Maybe more like rivals.” 

More like, probably not at all, Sakura thought and nearly cringed at the memory of their last interaction.

“Okay then.”

Kurenai-sensei looked relieved and Sakura felt a bit guilty for twisting the truth. 

She patted her on the shoulder before straightening and resuming their walk back to the farmhouse that came into view. Shino and Hinata were already at the porch and she could even spy Naruto and Sasuke, on opposite ends of the small cobblestone yard. She had no clue where Kiba was hiding with Akamaru.  
  
“I any case, someone like you will likely learn a lot from Kakashi. Just, keep in mind what I told you, okay, Sakura?”

“I will,” Sakura promised, effectively keeping the skepticism out of her voice. Someone like her? "And thank you for your instruction today.”

Kurenai-sensei smiled; she really was beautiful, Sakura decided.

“You’re very welcome, Sakura,” her voice was warm, “It was a pleasure to work with you.”

Yes, Team Eight had really gotten lucky with their Sensei.

***

“Teme – NO!”

Sakura nearly dropped her glass of water, cool condensation making it slippery. 

The sudden escalation of the usual background bickering was jarring in the lazy and sweltering evening heat. Hinata followed her out onto the porch, her own glass clutched between delicate fingers. 

Sasuke stood leaned against the trunk of one of the tall trees that shadowed the large farm house, fingers just disentangling from the tora sign; Naruto on the other hand had obviously been sitting on a wooden stool not far off, spooling a ridiculous amount of ninja wire into neat rolls.   
  
His latest one was unraveling in the grass where it had dropped and Naruto stared at Sasuke, aghast.

“You didn’t… Why did you…” He was clearly at a loss for words.   
  
“What? They were annoying me!” There was a smirk on Sasuke’s lips.

Naruto continued to stare and the smirk started to slip slightly.

“What!?”

“You… those were…”, Naruto seemed to be struggling for composure, “Those were Cross-striped Orange Fire Bugs!!! And you just… just flash-fried them!”

Sakura literally heard the capital letters in there.

“Oh no…”, at Sakura’s side, Hinata had a hand over her mouth.

“What?”, Sakura felt compelled to ask, though she went unheard. 

“What?”, Sasuke echoed, again, “We’ve been sucked dry by those pests since we came here!”

“But those were common Fire Bugs! The Orange Fire Bugs are an endangered species!”

Sasuke's raised brow communicated his ‘is there a difference?’ much clearer than his scoff. 

“Teme, how can you not know-“, Naruto threw up his hands and turned in a circle, looking somewhere between apoplectic and devastated. 

The most telling hint for an impending escalation, though, was Shino. When the boy stood from his perch on the engawa, there was an angry buzzing following him over to Naruto’s side.

“Indeed, Uchiha-san, how can you not know.” His usual collected and mellow voice held a strange dual timbre to it that made Sakura’s skin crawl.

And Sakura suddenly remembered that Shino had told her not to swat at the bugs just this morning. She was glad, she had listened.

Then, Hinata moved from her side.

“S-sasuke-san, the-there are sev-several books by Aburame a-and Hyuuga tha-that talk ab-about the Orange F-fire Bugs!” 

Even through her stutter, Hinata sounded stern.

Naruto was clearly flummoxed that he, for once, was getting support but rallied himself admiringly fast.

“Yeah, like she said!”, he crowed, finger pointed accusingly at his teammate, “They’re like, super important for pollinating the Hashirama Variant of Fire Country Echinacea. There’s even an addendum in the second part of the Nidaime’s Manifesto for Ecological Preservation that-“

Sakura’s brain short circuited for a moment and the rest of his words were drowned in disbelieve. 

What? 

Involuntarily, she flexed her chakra sharply. 

The scene remained the same. 

Sasuke clearly had no clue what to do in the face of that much bundled ire. The smirk was long gone from his lips and when Hinata put her hands on her hips, disapproving frown on her face, he took a step back.

Then, Shino started lecturing on the importance of Fire Bug mucus and Echinacea in immunology, hand on Naruto’s shoulder and voice still layered with the buzz of a thousand insects, words underscored by Hinata and Naruto adding facts and numbers every second sentence. 

Sakura forced her mouth shut with some difficulty.

“…the fuck?” Kiba, seemingly fresh out of the bath, had wandered up, gravitating towards her. His voice sounded about as disbelieving as she felt.

“I have no idea”, Sakura offered and chanced a glance at the boy she had last seen at the Hokage tower, fighting with his sister. A dropping wet Akamaru was perched on his head and gave a pitiful yip in her direction.

Kiba’s eyes were locked on the spectacle outside.

“I mean… that’s Hinata! And Shino!”

“I know…”

“And they’re…”

“Yeah… “

“With Naruto!”

“Uh-hu…”

“They’re yelling! Is this a-“

“Genjutsu? No, I already checked…” 

“Huh…,” a grin stole on his face suddenly and sharp incisors peeked over his lower lip. “I gotta take that opportunity. S’rry, I have ta…”

He shrugged apologetically in her direction. “Let's chat later, yeah?” 

Sakura called the day a win when she saw Kiba’s small dog bite down on Sasuke’s shoes, derailing the whole argument into a tumbling, stumbling mess of limbs. 

Poor Hinata, caught red-faced between Naruto and Shino holding each other up.   
  
Not even bothering to suppress her grin, she walked back inside, past the two suspiciously silent Jounin-sensei at the window. 

While she’d love to watch the train wreck for a while longer, she itched with dried dirt and sweat. She’d take the convenient distraction to hijack the one available bathroom for herself. 

Hopefully, there wouldn’t be too many dog hairs clogging the drain.

***

“So, does this count as a team dinner?”, Kakashi-sensei asked, snatching another piece of beef from under Sasuke’s chopsticks lazily.

The two Konoha Teams were seated in the spacey living area in the lower floor of Watanabe-san’s too large homestead. They were loosely separated by several rice paper screens but mostly, it was the loud sizzling of the meat on their barbecue that gave them a small measure of privacy. 

This was a good thing, too, because Sasuke’s hackles hadn’t lowered since the spontaneous intellectual beat down he had received earlier. 

The boy glared half-heartedly.

“Sure it does!”, Naruto said, mouth full. 

“It really doesn’t. He’s not paying for it. He didn’t cook it either. So, it’s not a team dinner.” Sasuke certainly seemed grouchy about his disappearing pieces of meat. 

Sakura delicately liberated several nearly charred pieces of mushroom from Naruto’s side of the barbecue. Kakashi kept pushing vegetables over to his side and Naruto kept burning them to charcoaled crisps.

Feeling defensive and angry, funnily enough, seemed to free Sasuke’s hidden vocabulary.

“Mou, that’s unfair, Sasuke-kun. This is dinner, we are a team. By every definition, this is a team dinner.”

“There’s also Team Eight here. Not paying for dinner. On a mission”, Sasuke bit back and tried, in vain, to recapture his food.

“Are you implying that a dinner with a team is a team dinner only when it takes place outside of mandated training time or missions?” Kakashi let his chopsticks sink slowly and leaned over towards Sasuke, conveniently blocking him from his food in the process. ”Are you, per chance, looking for an excuse to… socialize with us?!”

“Wha- No!” 

The half-horrified shout caused a lull in Team Eight’s conversation where they sat further to their left, half-closed shoji-door between them.

When no larger catastrophe was forthcoming, their quiet chatter took up again. 

Sasuke scowled at Kakashi-sensei. 

“As if I’d like to see more of you than I already have to.”

“Mou, Sasuke-kun, that hits me right here!”, Kakashi-sensei slapped his left palm on his heart, his chopsticks in his right hand unabashedly inching towards Sasuke’s plate. His frame screamed wry amusement. 

Naruto, chin on fist, observed his annoyed teammate, something nearly calculating flitting across his face for a second.

“Huh, teme’s right, Kaka-sensei!”, he cried, eyes squinted shut in a large grin. Sakura didn’t really trust it. 

And now that she thought about it; how had she never noticed how Naruto’s wide grins conveniently hid his eyes and stretched his face far enough that no micro expressions found any place on it.

She contemplated the setup for half of a short second and decided that whatever Naruto’s plan, it couldn’t be too terribly nefarious. In any case, it likely went against either Sasuke or Kakashi, so she was reasonably safe.

“Yes, Kakashi-sensei. Sasuke is right. We really can’t count this as a Team Dinner.” 

Her wide smile, as innocent as she could make it, garnered her a dry look from her sensei.

Naruto jumped on the chance to make use of the unforeseen help. “Ano, ano Sakura-chan, but it’s only a Team Dinner if Kaka-sensei pays, ya know?”

“Oh, I didn’t even think about this,” Sakura shot Naruto a smile and a thumbs-up, “so we definitely have to have a real Team Dinner in Konoha!”

“Yeah, like Sasuke-teme said!”

“Oi, dobe, I didn’t say-“

“Now that is what I call team-work, my dear Genin.” Sakura wasn’t sure if she just imagined the amused look Kakashi-sensei threw in Sasuke’s direction, “it’s a date then.”

“It’s not a-“

“You bet it is, K’kashi-sensei!” 

“Thanks for the invitation, Kakashi-sensei,” Sakura smiled demurely.

Sakura looked at the tableau - Kakashi, layering plan after plan into a simple dinner conversation, Naruto, using Kakashi's openings to get a free meal and company, herself, playing along just to see everyone's reactions and Sasuke, rookie of the year, last Uchiha, being the only one to react honestly and with no ulterior motive – and wondered. 

***

“Hey, Naruto-kun,” Sakura whispered when the boy had finally finished stumbling around in the dark room to shimmy into his bedroll.

“Ah, Sakura-chan, did I wake you up? I tried to be all quiet-like but the bastard’s stuff-“

“I wasn’t asleep, yet,” she interrupted before his rant about the still absent Sasuke would invariably derail any attempt at conversation.

“Oh, good, then.” 

She could hear him virtually deflating.

“I was wondering; that thing about the Fire Bugs…”

“O-oh, hehehe.” 

The chuffed way he ruffled his hair was easily audible. “’t was really impressive, wasn’t it? I mean, the Teme totally didn’t expect it!”

Sakura was glad that the dark hid her grin otherwise Naruto would definitely go on gloating, spurned on by her amusement. 

“Did we learn that at the Academy? About those bugs, I mean…,” she said, leadingly. Were she and Sasuke, top male and female shinobi graduates of the year, really the only ones that didn’t know about those critters?

Naruto’s ever present fidgeting stilled for a moment.

Then he mumbled something. 

“You… read it… in a book?”, Sakura translated slowly, bewildered. 

The rapid nodding of his head was nearly audible.

“Ahh… do you… read books like that… often?”   
  
There was awkward shuffling. 

“My clones took out the wrong book and then just kept reading like I ordered them, ya know…, Ithoughtitwasaboutramenrecipes” Naruto’s voice bled embarrassed red even through the darkened room. 

Sakura smothered her snort in her pillow. That was such a Naruto-thing to do. And it totally explained the reality-breaking experience of Naruto citing Nidaime-sama’s bylaws on agriculture and biodiversity.

“Ne, Sakura-chan…,” he whispered a while later.

Blearily, she blinked the first wisps of sleep from her eyes.

“That thing with the Kage Bunshin… that learning and memory thingy…that's really cool.”

He went quiet and Sakura nearly fell asleep again.

“So. Thanks, I guess. For showing me.”

“Huh?” 

When had she shown him what?

“With the Water Walking an the Clones, ya know. Thanks for showing me, Sakura-chan.”

Oh, that.

“You're welcome, Naruto.”

Something uncoiled in her chest at Naruto's earnest acknowledgement. 

***

  
**OMAKE (or something like it)**   
_(I finally understand why people write them: this is not really necessary for your understanding and it’s much too short for an extra chapter but writing it made me smile. It will give you another character voice that I don't like using too much. The content it true to the story, just take the way it's written with a grain of salt. It's a bit of an exageration.)_

This, Naruto was sure, had to have been the best day of his life. 

Okay, okay, maybe not, like, the best, because Iruka-sensei and Jiji hadn’t been there to see it and there was no Ramen and-

But anyway, it was still a really good day, believe it!

And yeah, that thing with drooling on Sasuke-teme’s arm was totally disgusting and-

Urgh. Better forget about that.

What was he thinking again- 

Oh, yeah! He got to learn a knew jutsu! So, yeah, it was teme who showed him but he totally and absolutely rocked it! Like, so much that the bastard got this sour expression on his face again! But really, this Fuuton jutsu was sooooo easy. Like super duper extra easy. 

As easy as farting.

… blowing a wind…? Hm… there was a joke here somewhere, believe it!

And then, and then, he didn’t even have to work with dog-breath! Because he was cutting trees like a super master tree cutter. Lumberjack. Whatever. 

Didn’t Sakura-chan have to save some lumbermen? They didn’t maybe sound so super, after all… but Sakura-chan was really super and dog-breath did keep asking awfully stupid questions about Sakura-chan.

Like, how should he know if Sakura’s parents were ninja? Or if she was on a specialized Genin roaster? What was that supposed to be, huh? No one was going to roast Sakura-chan! That dumb idiot!

Buuuuut, maybe dog-breath was just jealous. Because he wasn’t on a team with Sakura-chan. So. There. 

But the best part came even after that!

Because the whole of Team Eight took his side. His! Even annoying dog-breath! His and not the bastard’s! They even helped him! Because they knew about the crazy weird Bug stuff, too!

And then! And thenandthenandthen! Sakura-chan helped him with the Team Dinner Plan TM! And Kakashi-sensei, too. But sensei kinda didn’t count because he was just playing along to annoy the Teme. 

And okay, yeah, Sakura-chan was kinda weird since the thing with that Zabuza guy and didn’t really talk to them much but she was still. So. Pretty.

And intelligent.

And she’d even anow- acknowledged his thanks. Ha! New cool word right there!

Anyway, this had been a perfect day. Maybe he should go outside and watch bugs with Shino now. Because he totally couldn’t just go to sleep, yet. And Shino was nice! Like, weird, but definitely nice!

Oh, he was sooo awake!

And happy.

Content?

Hmmmm… like a large bubble in his chest making things bouncy… buoyed!

Great idea, giving his Clones a dictionary, believe it! 

(And he was totally forever ignoring that two killed themselves because it was sooooo boring! Worth it!)

**OMAKE END**

  
***

* * *

_“People do not lack strength; they lack will.” Victor Hugo_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I was thinking... I have unfinished stories and plot bunnies crowding my virtual closet. They only exist offline so far but I kind of don't really trust my tablet pc. Should I put them on AO3? Could be just a bunch of one shots collected in a series for the unfinished but unforgotten.
> 
> What do you think?

**Author's Note:**

> I regret nothing.
> 
> I don't. Seriously! 
> 
> Stop looking at me like that!


End file.
